Hi,
I’m new to DigitalPro. I’ve recently downloaded DP6 RC2 and I’m running it in evaluation mode. I’ve got a couple questions about DigitalPro functions.

Is it possible to have images rated with stars and labeled with colors independently? I am looking for usage similar to Nikon ViewNX. If so how is each controlled on the light table and slideshow windows?

Is it possible to put a ‘map it’ button on the light table tool bar and/or the slideshow tool bar.

Alan

Alan--Great to hear you're evaluating DigitalPro. On the color & rating question, right now those two are linked, as much to avoid excessive confusion as anything, but you can certainly use any number of different keywords & keyword groups to further divide up your images. Is there a particular usage you have in mind for using colors & ratings separately?

Having a Map It button on either toolbar is certainly doable. Since it is something of an advanced feature for folks I suspect what we'd prefer to do is make it a menu command on the toolbar with a keyboard shortcut, and then anyone who wanted to put it on the toolbar itself could customize the toolbar to add it.

In the meantime if you click on the little "GPS" InfoIcon on the light table it will bring you right to the GPS/MapIt page of the image properties. Please holler with any other feedback or questions--David

David,

I've used star ratings to quickly go through my images with several passes. The first pass 1 star next pass 2 stars. I've used the color labels for other choices, picking a few out, or grouping a few together. I've used a color label for a quick first pass to delete the ovious bad pictures, picking the bad ones into a group then selecting the group for a look at the thumbs so I don't make a mistake then deleting the group. I've used Nikon ViewNX in this way and found it useful and quick.

David,

Do you think there might be, in DigitalPro, separate control over ratings (stars) and labels (colors) soon. I believe you are already storing these separately, using labels for ratings.

Alan

Alan--That's a good question. One of the tricky bits is that there is no standard field for color-coding, so anything like that would not be portable across applications. That's one reason we use the IPTC "Urgency" field and the XMP "Rating" field which are both industry standards and are typically linked.

We do have very extensive keyword support, so it'd be trivial to create a bunch of keywords for the various colors (or any other set of values) and then assign them.

However, that doesn't address the other advantage of color-coding, which is visibility. So we're thinking about options for that.

In short, I'm not sure what we'll do. Keeping colors & ratings linked has a lot of advantages for users who want quick visual feedback on their "hot" images, but you make a good point about having additional visible categories.

Sorry for the long answer, but you might want to experiment a little with keywords in the meantime (since they can be persisted to a file and used across applications) and let us know if you think they could be modified/enhanced to do what you want.--David