Notes on images

[olibclarke@…]

The following bug report has been submitted:
Platform:        Darwin-18.6.0-x86_64-i386-64bit
ChimeraX Version: 0.9 (2019-06-05)
Description
Hi,

Another ferature request:

Would it be possible to add a notes section when saving images?

I would envision this being text, written to the image itself - let's say appended to the bottom, outside the specified area of the scene, with a maximum of say 280 characters (or whatever is reasonable).

The rationale for this is as follows:

When I am making figure panels, I  will often make many versions of each panel, with different settings, over a long period of time (e.g. multiple revisions of a paper). I like to report the settings that were used to produce the figure in the figure legend (threshold, hide dust or zone settings, sequence range, color scheme etc) - but keeping track of this info on a per panel basis is really tedious. This would be much easier if I could save this metadata (or whatever notes I like) to the original source image itself, in a form that can be easily cropped out later. 

I would see this as being a checkbox with a small text entry box for those who want it available when saving an image.

I know it's a bit out of left field (and maybe it's too hard to implement) - but if it is possible I suspect a lot of people would use it.

Cheers
Oli

Log:
UCSF ChimeraX version: 0.9 (2019-06-05)  
© 2016-2019 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.  
How to cite UCSF ChimeraX  

> open 1bl8 format mmCIF fromDatabase pdb

1bl8 title:  
Potassium channel (KCSA) from streptomyces lividans [more info...]  
  
Chain information for 1bl8 #1  
---  
Chain | Description  
A B C D | protein (potassium channel protein)  
  
  




OpenGL version: 4.1 ATI-2.9.26
OpenGL renderer: AMD Radeon Pro 580 OpenGL Engine
OpenGL vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.

[Tom Goddard]

A common way to attach extra info to an image is using EXIF data in the image file header. The exif data is easy to view

​https://www.fireebok.com/resource/how-to-view-photo-exif-data-on-windows-mac-ios.html

An issue is that PNG only added exif support in 2017 so I don't know if PNG exif is easy to write or view. With JPEG images it is very well-supported but we encourage using PNG for publication images since it is lossless.

I think using EXIF meta data is the way to go rather than writing text on the image itself. I think very few people would use the text written on the image because of the inconvenience of having to crop it out later.

[olibclarke@…]

Either would be fine - I was just thinking writing on the image because I thought it might be easier to implement for multiple image types (and I disagree re convenience - we almost always crop images to one degree or another when making figs, it’s a 2 second job in any vector graphics program), but any kind of metadata one could save with the image to read later would be very helpful!

Cheers
Oli

[olibclarke@…]

The nice thing about writing below the image is that it doesn’t matter what platform you are using, and it is visible right there while you are making the figure, so you can put it directly into the fig legend at the same time

In Mac OS X viewing EXIF data is kind of convoluted - you have to open it in Preview and then open an inspector to view the EXIF data - would be easier I think to just (optionally) attach notes below the image

But any kind of metadata would be good to have!

Oli

[olibclarke@…]

Another analogy - I would never use the pre generated residue labels in a figure, because I can’t manipulate them in a vector graphics program (changing font, size, etc). But I will frequently save images with labels (actually mightn’t be a bad idea to have checkboxes in the save image dialog to control whether labels are saved with the image...), so that when I later annotate the image in a vector graphics program, I have a reference to work off, alongside the unlabeled image.

I would see the option of appending notes to an image as the same kind of thing - providing an easy reference for later annotation.

Cheers
Oli

[Greg Couch]

Chimera has this capability. It would set the 'description' option and had that off to PIL. For PNG images, the description was put in the Title property.

[Tom Goddard]

In ChimeraX the residue and atom labels are submodel of the structure, so you can easily hide the labels using Model Panel.

[Tom Goddard]

Another drawback of writing notes in an image is that they cannot be copy and pasted as text.

At any rate, I think this somewhat crazy idea has some merit, but we have so many hundreds of other higher priority problems to solve that I don't expect we will have time to work on this idea.

[olibclarke@…]

Got it, fair enough - I don’t think that’s a huge drawback for a few words re map thresholds and such - main thing is keeping a permanent record attached to the image - but totally understand there are a lot of things more important to do. ChimeraX is looking better and better these days, loving all the new features!

Oli