It would be great to have a simple little clickable icon in the corner of each picture as your browsing your library to mark it as a āfavoriteā.
Even better would be to have the ability to pick one custom tag to assign to that button. So any time you tap that button it will tag the photo with whatever tag you set in the settings.
As of right now something this small is whatās keeping me using Photo Prism. Because with a library of almost 200k images itās nice to just be able to quickly mark the best or most important pictures.
Welcome to PhotoStructure @Redletter20! Great suggestion: I agree, PhotoPrismās fave button is easy to use (I hadnāt checked it out for a while and played with the demo yesterday).
But the prerequisite for this feature is the ability to favorite an asset in the first place. A couple questions come from that:
Is there a difference between ratings, , or ?
I had a discussion with some earlier beta users about ratings and favorite/star, and some people wanted
a simple boolean: an asset is marked or not (used by google photos)
a five-star rating (used by adobe and DigiKam)
a ten-star rating (used by many professional DAMs)
Both 1. and either 2. or 3.
Some people suggested that adobeās flags to carry over.
I actually look at the rating metadata already, and those files rated -1 are excluded.
I could dare to simplify and just support 1., and if the metadata rating is > 3, mark it as a favorite.
And then what?
So, after youāve marked something as a favorite, how would you expect to get back to your favorites?
Is it just a nav menu like in PhotoPrism? The issue with that is it gets a bit unweildy when you have many hundred/thousand faved assets. I think making that view just do a search for faved:true would make it more useful.
Is it a mode that you turn on while browsing (only show faved assets)?
Something else clever you thought of
(Iāll build 1. after I finish search, and then I need to build delete/exclude, and then probably faces, and then thisā¦)
My suggestion - I donāt know if it has already been mentioned before:
ā make multi-selection easy ! Like in any file manager, [Left click] on the first picture, then [Ctrl]+[Left Click] to add another picture to the list of selection, or [Shift]+[Left Click] to select a range of pictures. On mobile devices, this would be [Long tap] on the first picture, then [Tap] on the others you want to add (andā¦ what is the usual move to select a range of files on a mobile ?)
ā Once you have one or several selected pictures, an overlay menu would appear with several actions to do on that selection (Rating or favorite / Share / Download / Move toā¦ / Delete or Trash / ā¦)
I definitely am onboard with the multi selection and being able to set a tag.
However I think a simple favorite or not with a page showing all favorites would be welcome too. Just a star, a heart, maybe just double tap the image. Then they all show up in a library called favorites. Simple and fast.
Totally understand the desire, and donāt disagreeā¦ I do strongly wish for the data to be stored somewhere in the normal EXIF/IPTC fields so that itās mobile across platforms. If itās ājustā in the PhotoStructure database, then itās āvendor lock-inā and Iāll avoid using it - which I would rather not
Absolutely: this is a big design goal of PhotoStructure from the beginning.
Iāve been completely sunk by prior abandoned apps that squirreled stuff into places that were hard to extricate.
I wanted to test the favorited:true search query, so I just added a tag parser that sets assets as favorited if the ābestā variant has a rating of >= 4. This will land in -alpha.3. UI to do mark assets as favorite (and save a sidecar or file metadata with a value of Rating) will come in a future release.
I suggest to start using custom EXIF hierarchical subject/keyword to store any PhotoStructure specific metadata, so itās available to view even outside of the PhotoStructure app itself if needed. Such as
The reason I suggested to keep the metadata in the HierarchicalSubject tag rather than custom XMP tags because most of the software Iāve used donāt have a nice way to view those. From the other hands, hierarchical keywords are visible even in standard Windows File Properties window (in a flat form, though)
Alternatively, I suggest you to use both custom XMP tags with the fallback to the hierarchical keywords.
Personally, I even use keywords like Albums > Album1 in addition to putting my photos to Album1 album in my DAM, so this information is not vendor-locked and I can easily switch my DAMs if needed
Since I saw the link to the initial release on the 2.0.0-alpha build I was re-reading this thread and thought of something- not asking for a change, just pointing out a different use case fir future thought.
Up the chain @mnm mentioned looking for items with >4 of whatever as favoritesā¦ makes sense and I donāt object.
Butā¦ I use stars differentlyā¦ itās a system I saw recommended somewhere and really clicked for me.
Good pictures get 1 starā¦ then the best of those might get 2ā¦ and the best of the twoās get a three- I donāt think I have any (yet) above that.
So instead of seeing a really good picture and saying āthatās a fiveā I say āthatās a starā. And then if Iām browsing starred pictures and one really stands out somehow, it gets another star.
I actually made the rating for what means be configurable, so we can handle 1 star. Itās just a toggle for now, though, so the āsuper starā isnāt handled (yet).
If a user has liked (or un-liked) an asset via PhotoStructure, and the asset file variations nor their sidecars have not been touched since that action was made, that value wins.
Otherwise, PhotoStructure looks for a number between -1 and 5 associated to the Rating metadata tag (see the XMP specification: (this supports a value from 0 to 5, or -1 for ārejectedā) in both files and sidecars. āFirst one in winsā: PhotoStructure first looks at the ābestā asset file variation and sidecars. If that file doesnāt have a value, it looks at the first file with a value in order of last-modified time. If no value is found, it looks at the RatingPercent tag (which is only rarely used) and converts it to a value between 0 and 5.
Given that we find either a Rating or RatingPercent, the asset will be considered ālikedā if the value is equal to or greater than the new-in-version 2.0 likeRating setting, which defaults to 3.
If we still donāt have a value yet, weāll look for a Google Takeout JSON file associated to any asset file variation. If any are found, and a favorited value is set, weāll use that.
, or 
?
means be configurable, so we can handle 1 star. Itās just a toggle for now, though, so the āsuper starā isnāt handled (yet).