I’m very curious which fields may get autosuggest functionality in future versions. e.g. If I enter a “Creator” for one image, an autosuggest might pop up as I entering the first few characters of the same name on a second image.
Also, how might this interact with Vocabularies?
It’s too early to discuss this in detail, but I just wanted to shed a little light into our plans regarding this feature.
Tropy will be able to distinguish between a number of different value types. At the moment all metadata fields are essentially strings (using a simple text input field). Going forward, we are planning to add more types (e.g., numbers, dates, names) — each type will allow us to optimize search and sort capabilities (e.g., search for matches in family names only, not in given names) and utilize dedicated input widgets.
Furthermore, metadata templates will potentially allow to define a set of possible values for a given property.
All this is to say, that, yes, we will definitely be looking to add auto-suggest functionality, but at this point we have not decided on some of the details (i.e., will the feature be limited to certain value types, properties, or based on template information). Stay tuned!
As a final note, I would like to draw attention to the bulk-editing feature. You can currently select multiple items by cmd/ctrl clicking on several items (using shift is not yet enabled in the current beta) and edit the data of multiple items at the same time. If you have a number of items to which you want to add a creator, for instance, of an already existing item you can select the existing item first and then, using ctrl/cmd, select the other items: if you then click on the creator field in the metadata panel (which would show the creator of the first item you selected) and just press return all the selected items will be assigned that creator. (If something went wrong you can undo the change) Obviously, this is not the same as auto-suggest, but I thought I’d mention it, because batch editing may not be immediately obvious in the current beta due to the lack of selecting items with shift.
I am also interested in an auto-suggest feature, especially in regards to tags. I am using tags to call out lots of specific information about each image, and those tags may only apply to half a dozen images out of my rapidly growing pool. For example, I would like to sort a group of itinerant performer advertisements by admission price, show elements, named troupes and performers, location, century, techniques demonstrated, etc. I estimate that I will have hundreds of tags once I get through my current batch of research images. In some cases spelling and terminology vary, so keeping track of whether I used “Reith” or “Rieth” and “spun glass” or “fiberglass” (without scrolling through the whole list of tags) is important.
I have used the bulk-editing feature to apply some tags, and it has already saved me time and effort. Thank you for including bulk uploading and bulk editing as features!! However, I often have to look at one image at a time to apply the majority of the relevant tags.
I know auto-suggest may not be a feature that will be added in the near future, but figured I would add my support for its development. I look forward to seeing how this part of Tropy evolves!
Good news, tag completions will likely land in one of the next releases (definitely before the end of the year).
When working with hundreds of tags, please be advised that Tropy’s interface is currently not optimized for large numbers of tags. We were already discussing improving on that, so it’s good to know about use cases like yours.
We added tag auto completions in 1.0.2.
Hello,
I’m enjoying tropy for a project in political history involving a few thousands pictures (so far I organized about 1,000 without issues). I have the same issue as Inukshuk and a similar enquiry: having a lot of tags, it would be extremely useful to be able to find them automatically even if I don’t start by their initial.
Simple example: if I want to add the tag “philosophy of history” to an item, I am forced to type “ph…” to make the existing tag appear; if I type “history” nothing will appear.
Could this feature (I ignore its name) be considered for future development?
Thanks!
Edoardo
Yes, we can filter my matching the beginning of any word. We were worried that this would create too many results if you have a lot of tags, but it’s worth trying out.