tstoddard wrote:Actually, I believe that the "main" version is the default version, not the "album display" version. Portfolio collections do allow us to select one of the other versions and that selection will be remembered between sessions just like the sort order will be remembered. In my opinion, one of the shortcomings of version sets, is that a version can't be the main version and also have a place holder assigned to it.
I think of the main version as a special kind of placeholder (i.e., the version preferred for display and metadata handling). But if a version could have multiple placeholders - which doesn't seem unreasonable, if we regard placeholders as version-specific labels - then how could it be ensured that only one version per set is the main version (displayed by default)? Perhaps the main version needs to be exclusive indeed, or perhaps the concept could be dropped altogether (not sure how). For all its limits, the current implementation of placeholders has the merit of relative simplicity. (For the record, I think it would have been even simpler if exactly one placeholder was required per version - I don't quite understand why versions without placeholders are allowed or needed.)
This raises and old issue related to version sets in general. PSU's treatment of version sets as single entities can be limiting at times. What I mean by that is that once I put an image into a version set, I have limited access to it while it remains in that set.
FYI, yesterday I submitted a proposal aiming to improve the access to different versions via some kind of version filtering - see my notes added to
ticket 2525. (For the record, I dag into Mantis and my proposal could be considered a slimmed-down version of
ticket 1746, sumbitted one year ago by David Grundy. David's proposal is more detailed, complex and thought-out - mine is focused on relative simplicity.)
For example, If I have a raw file and two jpegs in a version set and I want both jpegs to be displayed in a portfolio collection, I can't do that. I have had to destroy version sets for this very reason. I might have one version that I've rendered in black and white and one in color, or I may have 2 versions that are cropped very differently and I want them both to be displayed in my collection. I think this is a reasonably realistic scenario.
To achieve this, I'm thinking that a new action could be added to the context menu for one or more thumbs in the collection viewer (or, even better, implemnted via true visual stacks): Expand the Entire Version Set(s). (N.B.: this would be different than "Show more From this Version Set" (Ctrl+Alt+V), which no longer displays other images from the current collection.) Then, in a ("static") portfolio collection you could manually remove the versions that you do NOT want displayed. From then on, the portfolio collection would remember exactly the same content, which may include multiple versions of the same image. That's just a rough idea - what do you think?
Portfolio collections are commonly used to manage online collections like those on Flickr or to create slide shows. In those instances, it is not unlikely that a user would want to upload or view in a slideshow more than one of the files in a version set. This has been discussed, ad nauseam, in some older posts
Perhaps it could help if more users posted votes or comments to Mantis - for all the discussions and complaints in the forum, I haven't encountered a versioning ticket that has attracted significant feedback. (Maybe I overlooked it.)
but I think it is relevant to a discussion about the behavior of portfolio collections because of the scenario I've described above.
Agreed. And, getting back to smart collections, I don't think setting specific versions for specific images would be needed (read: worth implementing) there either - the focus should be on dynamic content. However, if versioning filters were to be implemented at some point, they could be used in smart collections and dynamic searches. (As a matter of fact, favorites and dynamic searches can already use version placeholders - but the view for the current collection cannot be easily filtered.)