Handling aside the "features"

[DarkClown]

Hi AP developers,

 

aside the feature (and related bug) discussions I'd like to bring your attention to some handling issues. As a photographer I'm dealing with many pictures every day so handling issues withing AP really matter for me. And I'm facing some serious hickups here that make working with AP really hard an exhausting.

1) No file-path is ever saved properly. So after saving keyboard shortcuts (always atz the same location) I completely have to enter my standard path for current export ... changing it again for my current import, changing it again for my standard macro path ... Suggestion: either AP should remember those pathes individually in addition to entering those pathes in my program settings.
2) AP seems to have problems of gaining focus (back again) when interaction with other applications (regardles if Lightroom calls AP with a picture file or a plugin has had temporarily control) - sometimes it works - sometimes it doesn't
3) Even though AP remembers what files have been open the last session it does not restore undocked windows to it's original size where they were left when closing the application - this costs a hell lot of time to each time set up the windows again correctly
4) Same refers to panels like the library panel. Each time I open AP again, the library panel shows unwanted groups but not the personal groups I am working with. Love to see UI settings beeing saved properly.

5) Unpredictable behaviour (not necessarily reproducable) does not improve trust into the code. E.g. gradationcurves and toncurves show histograms of the pixel level ...well at least after starting the program - but for not known reasons from a certain point of working with AP these histograms are not displayed at all any more (empty window). The funktionality of the filters is still given.
6) Each time I resize an image (and that's plenty of times a day) the interpolation method is set back to "bilinear" ... and each time I have to set it back to whatever else I prefere. This drives my crazy. If the UI would at least remember what my last setting was. It would as well be nice to have some resize presets for documents, since I'm quite often dealing with the same output sizes. (And adding a wishful feature here: implementing a setting saying "resize longest side to 1200px". This would be extremely helpful for resizing picture to the same maximum side lenght (regardless landscape or portrait) - extremely helpful for automation purpose (Macro!))

Thanks for having a look into these topics,

Cheers, Timo

Btw: this experience is based on the final version (not the beta).

[Mark Ingram]

Hi Timo, these are all sensible suggestions, and shouldn't be too difficult to add. I'm not sure about (2) and (5), we'll need to reproduce those issues in order to fix them.

[DarkClown]

Thanks, Mark, for the consideration!

[Keith Reeder]

I'd really like to see no. 6 implemented, Timo - in fact, I'd prefer to be able to set my choice of interpolation method permanently as a preference.

[curio]

Adding to this topic, feedback about ongoing operations stalling the UI is also lacking. Various operations take noticeable time even on powerful hardware, rendering the application unresponsive in the process (sometimes even to the extent of triggering a Windows "application does not respond" warning) without there being a progress indicator. This is rather disorienting for the user and not the way blocking operations should be handled. Coupled with the fact the AP is still prone to crash rather frequently, it always makes me fear that it's actually in the progress of crashing once again without me having saved my work prior to it.