1) If you were designing iPhoto or an equivalent, what is the min size that you would have specified for thumbnails and why?
If I am building software for "digital consumers"—iPhoto—I include options that meet the needs of my specific target audience. By and large, when "digital consumers" are organizing their photos, they look for very specific photos. They don't say, "I want to make a photo album of all the pictures I have which include a human head or heads." They say, "I want to make an album of pictures of Jane," or "I want to email the pictures of the Halloween party to Jane," or "Where is that picture of Jane at the Lincoln Memorial—the one where she is smiling, not the one where she is frowning?"
Consumers have scans and digital photos that fall into essentially very few categories: individual and group photos of the same friends and family members in various specific settings (for example, the Halloween party, the church picnic, the amusement park, hanging out in the living room); pets; and perhaps the rare photo of a landscape, some landmark they visited, or an event they attended.
The nature of these photos means that most look similar (that is, a human head or heads all clumped together) but are all very different (they are heads of different people in different specific settings). Imagine a coed in a sorority. She has 100 pictures of herself with four other girls. Problem is, they are never the same four girls. When viewed at the smallest size, the user will not be able to distinguish who the person/people are, let alone the context of the photo. The fact that the names of the photos are reduced to "M..." means that even these labels are of no use to her.
Even if a user is able to take his time and distinguish the photos from one another, user productivity is slowed to a crawl because (a) he must take more time to examine each photo and (b) the number of photos visible at one time makes scanning for one or a few photos much more difficult—there is too much information presented, and it is presented in a format requiring very close attention to detail.
That said, on my 15 inch display, seven rows by twelve columns of photos seems much better. Each photo is discernible and few of the names are shortened. Even at that setting, however, scanning 84 pictures for one or a few specific photos is probably almost too much for most "digital consumer" users. Of course, this is based only on my knowledge of interface research and my own specific computer setup—not exactly scientific. Give me a group of two hundred target users and two weeks, and I will tell you the exact size to the pixel.
2) In the case of selecting and moving a big batch of thumbnails as I mentioned above, would you have decided it wasn't important (and therefore not support it), or would you come up with another way to do it?
If I have 50 pictures of landscapes including blue sky in my library, then I am probably not the target audience for iPhoto as described above—more likely, I am better described as an amateur landscape photographer or a hobbyist photographer. If the reason Apple included small thumbnails was to meet the needs of these users, then they forgot their target audience. Small thumbnails may be appropriate for such users—it's iPhoto that is not supposed to be appropriate. iApps were never conceived of as "powerful enough for the pros, simple enough for the rest of us." They are supposed to be "plug and play for the average adult, who reads at a seventh grade level." Users who need to organize a massive library of black and white photos by category, for example, are supposed to step up to (and pay for) third party software.
3) And maybe the most telling question of all, do you have large number of photographs on your computer, and if so what program do you use to organize them?
As an amateur photographer, I have many photos on my computer. I use iPhoto to organize only my personal "consumer" photos—candid photos of friends, etc. I never use thumbnails at the smallest setting, even when dragging groups around to organize them. Instead, my iPhoto thumbnails are nearly always set to three columns by two rows—that's right: six viewable photos at a time. To organize my black and white photos, my clip art, my stock photography, I use the Finder or third party software like iView Multimedia or similar. iPhoto just isn't up to the task, and that's kind of the point: it isn't supposed to be.
J.
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