Hello @kevin.shank-0439, such a view would indeed be the icing on the cake.
But i’d settle for being able to copy only the main operations (without auto-values) in one way or another, since that would make my days much easier…
But thats the problem with doing it using the existing filmstrip and copy popup. While you want this model with auto params, someone else wants to set the sharpness slider, someone else wants to change the resolution. You basically have to reimplement the options dialog on the popup, yet even if that was done?
You are still left with the film strip being the worst interface for hovering, selecting, scrolling one by one, then hovering again to verify your subset options got applied to the subset of photos - compared to the detailed row/col view.
I spent over a week trying multiple times on several thousand photos just trying to turn off autoblur (what denoise actually does). My computer would lock up had to reboot/restart, or I would save and come back the next day and realize something was missed and still blurred.
I used gigapixel and while its interface was very easy to do this in mere minutes, turns out the AI models are not updated since January and lack the photo AI tweaks since.
I agree that that would be the best thing, but I am also a realist. Minor changes like tracking, which option was actually “touched” are pretty easy to implement (one checkbox in the UI and one property in the underlying code and a bit of logic). And modifying a method, to just copy over tracked properties is also done very quickly. That’s something you can easily achieve in one sprint.
Replacing the UI alltogether will take longer, that’s more on an epic scale. It will also affect UI Tests (if you have them). Plus you may have to convince product owners / management when you change the UI alltogether. No doubt - the UI in Gigapixel was superior, you will get no argument against that from me. But sometimes a new UI is also a marketing decision / strategy, to show we’ve got a brand new product, not just a variation of the old one - you have to buy that… Its seldom, that there are actual UI experts making the decisions (for what’s actually best). I can’t speak for Topazlabs of course - that’s just from general experience in software development projects over the last decades…
Gigapixel has same image preview and options dialog as photo the spreadsheetview is optional toggle. all the programming design is done they just need add new columns.
Photo is sold for restoring old photo collections and the existing filmstrip ui is simply not useable for that purpose setting up large batch jobs yet is also marketed as replacing gigapixel.
I agree, Photo AI, in its current state, is not usable for large batches in terms of UI.
That was something the UI for Gigapixel, etc. could handle with ease (that’s why I gave your idea a vote, you can return the favor with this thread 
).
Reasons: It takes forever to load all images, and even if that worked, you have no way to change the settings per picture (either you take autopilot as is for all, or you can simply forget it - as clicking on every image in the thumbs and selecting something individually is just not usable, it would take forever and you would crash the app in the middle of your 1000 pictures - and then you would never ever try again…) And even if you actually did manage to set up all options for 1000 images, once you clicked on save 1000 images the UI would be pretty non-responsive in showing the progress of the saving images.
But in my opinion it’s still two different issues. My (minimal invasive) idea was to simply alter the “Apply Settings to All” method (which already works) just in that way, that it only copies the stuff, the user actually changed (by choice) in the template image. Instead of copying everything (auto-detected). For me that would already solve 80% of the problems. Even with the old UI. Since the default scenario is that I have a folder with images, where I know exactly what I want to apply (sharpen standard, face 20, enhance graphics). And I want to apply just these to everything I just loaded. I don’t want to tweak any of the pictures (I even could with the thumbs, even though they are slow).
But the way it is now I can completely forget that. As I can’t even set “sharpen: standard” for all loaded, without copying over specific settings for the first loaded picture.
I’m hoping that TopazLabs will do something about it - anything at all. Your option would be best with the Gigapixel UI. But if they don’t want to go for that (for whatever reason) let’s hope they at least implement something along my idea. Otherwise I don’t know how we are supposed to be using Photo AI for batches at all. And continuing to use the old products (Gigapixel, Sharpen, …) can’t be the solution, either. As Photo AI undoubtedly produces superior results…
Just my two cents
P.S. For large size batches I’m still hoping for enhanced CLI capabilities to come. That would make things much easier Photo AI CLI - allow arguments to influence settings
Just changing the popup menu does not solve the problem of subset batch photo settings using a filmstrip to select things. Instead you would have to subset load using the windows browser and subset save batches which defeats the entire point of batching. And even that does not work with venn diagram batch overlaps these need 4x those need blur off that need sharpen. Just changing the popup like that means it still cannot be used. My stuff takes days to run and has subset venn settings to do. Are you going to rearrange your windows subdir structure with every patch release to keep up with option tweaks?
All I want to do is load an entire folder in Photo AI , select sharpen standard, face 20 and let it rip.
Without having to click on 1000 pictures manually.
If I try that now with “apply settings to all” it would work half way. But it would use all auto-detected settings from the first picture and apply that to the other 999. Which makes it unusable.
That’s the main use case for me. I know which pictures are blurred (I sorted them out already in the explorer). The auto-detect feature of when to sharpen a picture (low/medium/high autopilot preferences) is not really working for me. It worked pretty good in Sharpen AI.
And once that set of pictures is done, there will be no need for me to run them through another version of Photo AI.
Yes there is. They update every week. Maybe they will fix the poor results of streaks and blurs next week that you had no choice but to accept before. Are you going to reorganize with windows then and copy it to a new source dir structure moving things around based on subset setting batches only to find out it did not improve like they said? Using windows explorer for subset batching is not going to solve this, even if you have the time and diskspace to do that directory rearragning, you still cannot do venn diagram subsets that way (these are 4x but sharp, those are 2x but sharp, these are 4x but blur - are you going to rearrange that dir every release?). And given how each release has a regression failure, that is just not going to work. With gigapixel I had a dozen overlapping subsets and easily setup my batch job and let it run the rest of the week
Of course it would be nice to save that spreadsheet config for CLI batching and even XLS/CSV/JSON editing. But that is a seperate topic. Gigapixel is very easy GUI to use so is easy to redo next week since I will want to resample some previews to see if subsets need to rearrange anyways. Doing that with windows explorer instead is not feasible.
I could agree with you, if the photosets in Gigapixel would actually be persisted (on disk or database). But if you loose all the settings every time you close the program (and you will have to close it for an update), it’s still a lot of work to re-assign everything for every photoset.
If I was faced with that scenario I’d personally solve that with EXIF or IPTC tags.
I’d tag the photos with whatever info I needed for a future run (e.g. “process;sharpen:standard;face:no” or possibly even more generic along the lines of “blurry;no faces”) and then it wouldn’t matter, where the photo was stored (which folder). That would have the unique advantage of storing the info directly inside the image itself. Not in some external JSON/XML/… - because as soon as you reorganize your pictures, you also have to update your JSON/XML/… You could even edit the photos with 3rd party programs and save them, since most programs preserve EXIF tags.
I’ve already written a windows service, that recursively goes through a directory. I’d just add a method that would read out the tags of each photo and some logic to determine the appropriate additional arguments for the Photo AI CLI and trigger the CLI for each photo.
I could do the same thing without tags and just with file names (e.g. suffixes with certain meanings).
But: The CLI is not advanced enough yet, that it would accept parameters in that depth. Currently it will just auto-pilot every image. But hopefully it will be possible in the future, somewhere along the lines of Photo AI CLI - allow arguments to influence settings
[An absolute dream would be if loading such EXIF tagged images in Topaz Products would actually be interpreted on load and it would restore the settings - and vice versa being able to save the current settings in the original pictures EXIF data, If one chooses to. But I’m not kidding myself. We’ll be lucky if they improve one aspect of what we wrote in this and/or your other thread. As long as it’ll be possible to run a large batch of images with at least the same base settings and not the calculated values of the first image, I think it’s going to be a great improvement to now.]
P.S: By the way, I don’t use Windows Explorer. I use Total Commander, it’s much faster for file operations and using its shortcuts / multi renaming / selection / search tooling saves an extreme amount of time…
I agree this would be a great option for PAI to have. I would also like the ability to exclude a certain model from being used. Mainly the Lens Blur. Ever since it was introduced, PAI likes to use it a lot. The results are horrendous. Standard or Strong give much more satisfying results. So to add to the OP’s request, have the ability to exclude a model and use the AI to autodetect everything else.
I just had to do this again, this time for (only) 61 images. But it was such a pain in the a**.
I had the same kind of images (photography shots) and autopilot would detect some as enhance std and others with enhance low res. But I needed low res for all images (otherwise they look totally washed out).
So I had to load all images into the UI, click on every image once again, wait for the UI to complete loading, wait for the UI to change positions, click on low res and then after 20min I was finally able to click on save…
Please provide a better way for this… (CLI with selected models OR preferences with ability to disable some models OR Multi-Edit UI capabilities OR ApplyToAll without auto-detect values).
This is giving me headaches. 
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Hello, could you please change how presets changes Custom to All. Please leave custom justmake blank selection. I work on hunderds of files with presets and wasting time on each to change All to Custom.
With TPAI 3.5 Autopilot it is great that you can now set so many things in autopilot.
However it would be great to be able to save and restore these autopilot values in different profiles. That way you could have a bunch of autopilot settings in you were process JPG images, another for scanned images, and so on. This way you could easily swap between different autopilot settings and make the customisations far more user friendly.
Thank you for sharing this idea! The ability to save and restore Autopilot values in different profiles would make the process more efficient and customizable for different image types.
We appreciate you sharing this suggestion. Feedback like this helps us improve the software 
Currently, once I apply corrections to a photo, I can save the photo itself. However, I don’t think there is the possibility of saving the enhancements applied and with which parameters, if not by writing them manually on a sheet of paper 
. Obviously this does not make sense for a significant number of photos: it would be very useful to save the parameters applied for example in a file with the same name as the photo and perhaps in the same directory. If you want to regain the previous result after some time, starting from the original photo, you should be able to load the contents of this file and reapply it to the original photo. To be clearer, I ask you to save the enhancements applied to an image as a property of the image itself: when I reopen the same original image in the future, the system should ask me whether to display and apply the same improvements previously used for the same image. Basically, this is what most editors do (E.g. Lightroom): if you reopen an image that has already been processed, it restarts, showing the stack of changes made previously; the user can then decide whether to use them or not. This functionality has nothing to do with presets although technically it may seem similar but semantically and implementationally completely different.
I believe this request is even more valid today with TPAI 3.0. I’ll give you an example: I processed a photo with TPAI and, once I was satisfied, I saved the result; after a few days I realize that perhaps it would have been better to have a slightly different sharpenig while the other changes are fine: currently I should rework the photo from the beginning but who remembers what parameters I had set or what masks? I think the solution is to allow you to save all the enhancements applied to an image, including masks, and their order of application, which means saving the stack
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Thanks for the idea and suggestion! Make sure that you do not forget to vote for your idea 
I’ve been using Photo AI with Lightroom quite a bit in the last few months, and the suggestion here by @GinTonic is exactly what I would love to see. For some of the more challenging images, I’ve been manually recording the enhancements I performed, and it’s been helpful to have that quite a few times as I go back and want to take another run at improving the image or Photo AI adds a new capability that I think might help.
While I’d love to see an automated solution with Photo AI recognizing an image it’s already enhanced and offering to reapply them, a minimal solution would be to record that information in a log file that I could search when redoing an image. This would be much easier than what I’m doing manually now. Thanks,
Paul
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