Visual display of images & image functionality in wildbook

What Wildbook should this feature be in?

All or at least ACW

What would you like to see?

This has been noted verbally in conversations with WM but I thought I should register it formally. The visual display of images in the encounter and individual galleries is too small and having the keywords overlaying the images makes it even more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to see the actual image.
It is regularly impossible to use the functions layered on the image such as the ability to click on the arrow to go to the encounter record for another animal in the image or even just the ability to click on the image outside of the layers so it opens in a larger view.
Also, I think it would be more logical to have the ability to see all of the images associated with a marked individual on the marked individual page. Currently we only see a small sampling of the individual’s images on that page and have to go to an encounter record to see all images.

This also leads to a previous enhancement request re: the ability to mark a set of master images for an individual.
Per Gabriele Cozzi: “let’s have the best picture(s) of an individual (could be more than one to have one each of left/right/hind, for example). I will not need to use that picture to do any editing on the tags of other pictures. Tags are picture specific and should also remain so. But description is animals specific and that info should be propagated to all pictures of the same individual. If the master picture say that the focal animal is a male, this info should be propagated also on pictures (of the same individual) were the genitals are not to be seen.”

As images are the foundation of the system, these need to be the highlight and largest feature on the page. Usability needs to be much improved for the researcher.

How would this functionality help you?
It would make the images more usable and viewable to the user, and would give us access to the functions on the images. Currently, we often skip working on certain encounters simply because they are too difficult to work with.

Regarding your first request (keyword overlays on images reduces usability and image visibility), we are actively working on a ticket to address these issues. We are tracking the work under WB-634. It’s not a complete overhaul of the page styling, but we want to make sure that keywords and labelled keywords can be applied to the image easily regardless of number of keywords/labelled keywords used, and we want to reduce blockers of the initial thumbnail view of an image as much as possible. Expect to see this soon.

Regarding your second request (see all images associated with a marked individual on their page), there are some dependencies to manage before we could tackle this. We would need to determine how this is going to be impacted by the part-associated-to-body work that is coming up.

Regarding your third request (master images for an individual), this continues to be under review and will likely be a consideration for next generation only.

Thanks. There’s also a 4th request I maybe wasn’t clear enough about - the images are too small on the encounter & individual pages. I realize this is likely a “next gen” or new UI item but I wanted to be sure it’s captured somewhere in the funnel. A full width of the page, at the top of the encounter and marked individual pages, would be more useful and more usable.

Ah, thanks. I just missed it while trying to wrap my head around the others.

How do you see the interaction between having very large pictures and having a lot of pictures associated with a page? Would you need to click through the images? Scroll past all of them to get to metadata? Tabs, one with images and one with metadata?
I wouldn’t want to trade one set of usability issues for another by shifting things too far in the other direction with image visibility.

Good question. We’re not strong on design but we’ll give it some thought. The separate tab idea is interesting and my current favorite, I think. Gave me another idea - images of an individual sorted by date would also be great…

I think the design is an important aspect to consider here, since I think what you’re trying to request is an improvement to workflow. If we make the images bigger, but force people to scroll forever to get past them, that just creates a new workflow problem. @brmscheiner, any thoughts on this?

I totally agree that we don’t want to create a long scroll problem. With our species, we could have a lot of pics of any given individual. I think that’s why the separate tab is appealing. But I’d love to hear ideas from people with better design brains than mine.

Yes, all of these are good points, the other important consideration is page load time. Too many high-resolution images on the same page might make the site feel slow. In the new design I am trying to incorporate all of these needs.

Load time is definitely a concern. I could see a flow involving a separate tab (on the marked individual page) with large-ish thumbnails or low res versions of the images, with the ability to click through from the image to the related encounter page where the hi res version would reside as a single image (as previously requested, to be much larger than it currently is). I don’t see a need for the encounter page to hold all of the images from related encounters/the same individual, as it does now. From there, having the ability to click back to the marked individual page, without having to scroll down to the Identity section and click through to the individual that’s the encounter is linked to, would also work better than currently. Navigating between the individual record and the related encounter records, via the images, would feel more intuitive than it does today.