Metadata edit: pagination

[StephenChan]

Images and Patches pages already do this, so it might make sense to do it for metadata as well. With thousands of images shown at once, the grid interface can be very slow to load and slow to interact with.

When the items are paginated, though, it hurts the utility of the "Select all" checkbox. Yes, Gmail has a "Select all" feature that can span multiple pages, but it makes more sense for actions that are applied immediately, like "Mark as read". In our metadata edit interface, we edit some fields, possibly edit some other fields, and then finally click Save Changes - not an immediate application, and so it's tricky for the user to keep track of edits made to other pages. So basically, a multi-page Select all seems awkward, and a current-page Select all isn't powerful enough.

Perhaps implementing #45 first would allow the user to squeeze everything in a single page in case they want Select all, and use smaller pages otherwise. Still feels a bit unsatisfying though.

[StephenChan]

When I marked this issue as 'unsure', I may not have accounted for the fact that sources can have 10,000 images or more. No matter what we do, the Edit Metadata interface is going to be really hard to use at that point.

And although we can address issue #130 and recommend people to narrow down their searches, mistakes will be made, and 'punishing' those mistakes with a 10 minute page load isn't really the way to go.

I'd now also argue that, even if we don't have a 'Select all' checkbox that spans across multiple pages, paginating (say, with 50 results per page) would still be an overall win for usability. Implementing pagination like that would be relatively simple to do. This wouldn't accommodate someone who wants to set the 'camera' field for 10,000 images at once, but 10 minute page loads don't really accommodate that either. Their best bet would be the Upload Metadata form in that use case. (If the uploaded CSV only contains 'Image name' and 'Camera' columns, the other metadata fields will remain untouched.)

[StephenChan]

Here is an idea for editing across all pages: no need to imitate Gmail necessarily, just add another form specifically for assigning values to all pages' results. Less unified UI, but likely more straightforward to implement. (Though still not a 1-day task.) Mock-up screenshot:

It would have to be clarified that blank fields will leave existing values unchanged rather than deleting them.

[beijbom]

Looks good to me. Although, there are many more columns right? So we’d need a horizontal scroll bar.

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 11:22 StephenChan [email protected] wrote:

Here is an idea for editing across all pages: no need to imitate Gmail necessarily, just add another form specifically for assigning values to all pages' results. Less unified UI, but likely more straightforward to implement. Mock-up screenshot:

[image: 2020-06-17_metadata-edit_across-all-pages-idea] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/857711/84933507-d98b9380-b08a-11ea-9655-46e4aa4047f6.png

It would have to be clarified that blank fields will leave existing values unchanged rather than deleting them.

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[StephenChan]

there are many more columns right? So we’d need a horizontal scroll bar.

Correct.

[beijbom]

Ok. Well, the only possible problem I see then is coercing people to use this form rather than the main one. But if this goes along with the pagination idea, and the pagination only allows editing of returns on the page, then it seems we are good to go.

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 18:56 StephenChan [email protected] wrote:

there are many more columns right? So we’d need a horizontal scroll bar.

Correct.

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[StephenChan]

But if this goes along with the pagination idea, and the pagination only allows editing of returns on the page, then it seems we are good to go.

Yeah, that's what I had in mind as well.