Daminion Forums: Debugger - Viewing Profile - Daminion Forums

I've been scanning some old negatives from the 1920s, taken in Denmark. It isn't always easy to figure out what is the correct orientation, i.e., which side of the negative should be face down in the scanner. Often I later find new information that indicates that I've scanned the negative incorrectly. I haven't been able to find a command in Daminion that would allow me to simply flip a picture left-to-right, i.e., reverse it. It would be very handy, given that the reversed image has been scanned, adjusted, sharpened, etc.

If there were such a command, I believe that it should reside with the rotation commands in the submenu under Actions, which appears when you right-click on a photo.

Or does the command already exist, and I just can't see it?

Minor problems and suggestions

-Assign-tags mode can be annoying.

-Upside-down photos at 100% magnification don’t drag correctly

-Show All and Stay Put Command.

-Thicker separation line in thumbs display.

-Daminion suddenly wanted to connect to the server.

I’m using Daminion 0.9.8(716)

1. Assign-tags mode can be annoying. The “Assign-Tags”mode is powerful and quite convenient – when it’s needed. However, I’ve found that there are extended situations in which having the “Assign Tags” mode come suddenly into effect can be quite annoying. At the annoying end of the spectrum, one has to constantly click on “Return to Filter Mode” all the time. At the disruptive end of the spectrum, one can inadvertently assign tags to multiple unknown photos because one isn’t expecting “Assign Tags” mode to be there. Not to mention that I, for one, have been known to make the unexpected/unwanted click somewhere random in the tags frame,just because my trigger finger is itchy.

I would really like to have a switch, say in the Preferences, that allows me to shut off the “Assign Tags” mode for a while, until I want it on again.

2. Upside-down photos at 100% magnification don’t drag correctly. One photo that had already been rotated 90 degrees in the catalog I just finished was of someone across from me at a restaurant who had an open menu in front of them on the table, the menu being upside-down in the photo. I decided I wanted to see if I could read the menu. So I rotated the photo 180 degrees and bumped the magnification to 100%. At 100% the photo is way bigger than the monitor screen, and so I tried to drag the photo lower so that I could view the menu, which was now at the top of the photo.

But it was impossible to do so, because as soon as I had dragged it a short way in any direction, the photo would suddenly jump back or back to the opposite edge. I tried this with a couple of other photos, with the same result. It also doesn’t matter which way you get to 100% magnification, either. I tried closing the program and restarting it, with the same result. It also doesn’t matter whether one uses the 180 degree rotation or two 90 degree rotations. This happen at some magnifications lower than 100%. I checked this in other catalogs and the same thing happens. And it happens with photos that haven’t been first rotated at all, i.e, are still horizontal, and then are rotated 180 degrees. But if the photo is displayed in its original orientation, it can be dragged around the screen at 100% magnification just fine. I am using a 19” (diagonal) monitor.

3. A "Show All and Stay Put" Command. There have been several times when I’ve been working on a photo and realized that, in order to be sure of what I was seeing, I needed to see one or more photos that were taken just before or just after the current photo, where the photos are sorted by either filename or creation date/time. I have accomplished this one way by displaying all the photos and then scrolling down to where the photo I was looking at is. But it might be nice to have a command available to cause the program immediately to display the, say 3 or n, photos on each side of the photo in question, according to the current sort.

Perhaps better might be a command to do a Show All, where the display doesn’t go back to the start, but rather centers itself around the current photo (i.e., Show All and Stay Put).

4. Thicker separation line in thumbs display. The display of thumbs shows a row of photos, a row of Thumbnail Captions, and then another row of photos. The row of captions has a darker gray background. I’m wondering if the display might be more immediately readable if the thin black separation line between the captions row and the photos of the row below was made slightly thicker, to emphasize the distinction between one row of photos with their information and the next row. If the Titles of the photos are displayed above the photo and if the Description for the previous row of thumbs is there, but empty, and in other situations, it can sometimes seem as if the lower caption lines might refer to the photos below, rather than above.

5. Daminion suddenly wanted to connect to the server. I was busy with tags and rotations, when suddenly an error message appeared on the screen, saying, “Unable to connect to the server!” followed by a list of things to check. The problem is that I am using Daminion without the server program and I didn't open a shared catalog. I believe that I had just clicked on a thumb so that I could rotate it. I was hurrying through some boring tasks and so I might have not clicked correctly on the photo, I don’t know.

In addition to getting this error message, was the fact that there was no way to get out of it. Clicking on either Yes or No in the error message box caused another window to appear which said “Please wait”. Clicking on Cancel in the latter caused me to go back to the original error message. Clicking on the X in the upper right of the main window wouldn’t work because there was a response wanted from me. In the end I had to use the Task Manager to just kill the program. When I started the program up again, everything was fine. I’m sorry I can’t be more informative about the context, although I did take a screen shot so that I could remember the error message.

I've stumbled upon what seems to be a minor bug that occurs with using "Select All" after having used "Show All".

I am able to successfully use "Select All" in any other circumstance. "Select All" will work correctly when all or a subset of the thumbnails are showing in any other situation. But if click on "Show all" and then click on "Select All", nothing happens. Even after this bug happens, if I then cause all the photos to display, say by clicking on a keyword that is currently in all the photos, "Select All" will work correctly. I can also select all the photos by clicking on the first and last photo while holding down the Shift key. But if I want to do it the easy way via "Show All" and then "Select All", I can't. This happens even if the catalog consists of a single photo.

I've tried this in several catalogs and after rebooting, but the bug, if it is a bug, is still there. I tried to find a reference to anything like this in the forum, but couldn't.

I'm using version 0.9.8 (build 716).

Sorry, but I have another question. I apologize if I've just missed the information.

I have a couple hundred rolls of 35mm film organized by roll number and photo number. The information for each photo is in a MS Office Access database from which I used to print labels for the backsides of the photos. Included info is roll#, photo#, date, description.

I don't want to have to type all this in to the properties frame in Daminion, so I had in mind to use ExifTool. I would modify the MS Access reports to create a .BAT file in which there would be one ExifTool command line with the photo file name (now scanned) and various tags for the rest of the info.

The description and date cause no problem, but when I create keywords for Roll and Roll number, along with Photo and Photo number it becomes unclear to me. The Roll, Roll number, Photo and Photo number are definitely stored in the photo somewhere. According to your online docs, you store the keyword info in the IPTC/XMS sections. But when I use the Show all Metadata command under Actions, even after I've exited and restarted Daminion and can see the keywords in the properties frame, I can't find the keyword information anywhere in the metadata display.

I would imagine that I would use quoted strings with backslashes to depict nested keywords, but I have no idea what tags I would use in ExifTool to insert the info into a photo, in particular where Daminion would be expecting it. By using ExifTool outside of Daminion, I am still unable to see the keyword information.

Additionally, would other programs be able to correctly read the keyword into? I suppose they wouldn't know what to do with it for complex nesting, but one would want to get at the info somehow. How would one do that without Daminion?

If users aren't supposed to know how the keyword info is coded in the metadata, then might you be able to tell me how I could automate adding the metadata for keywords?

Thank you.

Hello,

I went to a certain amount of trouble to create folder names for about 800 photos, so that when sorted by name, the folders were in order by time of creation date-time of the photos therein. When I imported the super folder which contained these 45 folders, they were somewhat jumbled in the left frame under "Folders". I could find no way to sort them. When I restarted Daminion later, I found that the folders were, in fact, sorted by folder name, which is what I wanted. Back when I had just imported the folders, even the folders in the little window for setting folder filters were sorted. So it didn't make sense that the folders themselves weren't sorted immediately after being imported. I'm not sure this is even worth complaining about, given that the folders are sorted after Daminion is restarted once. But it would make things a bit easier to assign keywords, etc, if they were sorted immediately.

I'm using the latest version (716).

Thanks.