Keyboard Shortcuts for Paging Through Digital Images

LegacyUser

Marcia Brady said: I wish you would add keyboard shortcut keys to the digital image viewer for paging and browsing through digital images. Right now you have to click the forward or backward arrow to navigate through images. Sometimes there can be thousands of images in a title and all the clicking causes hand fatigue and sometimes pain. As more and more of your collections get digitized, I think this enhancement will help a lot of your patrons. Thank you in advance for your consideration!

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: One thing that we did in training new missionaries was for every hour or so of work at a computer, we would require the trainers and missionaries to stand and "shake it out" to get their bodies loose and that helped prevent any fatigue problems. I've had two different Chiropractors advise not sitting for more than 45 minutes at a time in front of the computer.

There is a problem with rapidly paging back and forth with the image viewer and that is the the system eventually hangs with a blank screen. What happens is that the browser cache loads and retains each page viewed and eventually eats up available memory. I've run into the problem recently, especially on an older Windows 7 laptop with 6 GB of memory.

But yes, I would love to be able to navigate using the arrow keys.

LegacyUser

Stewart Millar said: Marcia,

In using these digitised films there are two considerations that can help in finding the page(s) of interest:

(1) "binary chop" approach . . . you will generally know the date or date range you are interested in . . . so, if there are 1500 images on the film covering 1780 to 1880 and you are interested in around 1810 which is around one third into the date range . . . then enter image number 500 and go to image 500 directly to see what date that covers . . . then adjust your guesses in appropriate leaps forward or backwards to get closer to the required date . . . eventually - after a few tries - enabaling you to page forward or backwards one page at a time to reach the pages you might be interested in.

(2) "Items" within a film - sometimes a film is made up of various different filmed records covering different record types,locations and periods (described in the Catalog description) . . . in which case I find it useful to make my own "index" of the "Items" I may be interested in - this proceeds by scrolling through the images looking for the black start frames of each "Item" and I then make a note of the contents of each such Item Number and its start image number . . . such that when I find an "Item" of interest I will know it starts at image 795 and finishes at image 1240 . . . and I can then do the "binary chopping" guesswork described above to zero in on the date range of interest.

I have never found it necessary to page through every image frame sequentially to find a page of interest.

LegacyUser

Jeff Wiseman said: Marcia,

You may not be aware of two features that can help you:



From the image above you can see the image number on the film that is being displayed. You may not realize that you can directly enter an image number there in order to "jump" to a specific image on the film (this is partly what Stewart Millar was talking about in his item #1)

Also in the image above you can see a special icon that has 6 little white squares. Clicking that icon will change your screen from viewing a single image to a view of all the images on the film. In this case you can not only jump around between images, You can also see where "batches" of images start and stop (this is what Stewart Millar was talking about in his item #2)

DiegoFarias4

Although the information in this site is invaluable, the navigation is poorly designed and confusing. It would be great if this is taking into consideration that browsing through several thousand pages is a healthy risk that could easily be addressed with some good web design.

John Empoliti

POSSIBLE SOLUTION: I've found that if you press and hold down the Down or Up, Left or Right Arrow keys, the selected action repeats until you release, and you can fly through the images, both in gallery mode (up and down and side to side) and in ribbon mode (side to side). In ribbon mode, the Down and Left arrows behave the same. Likewise for the Right and Up arrows. Even for a single press.

Caution: I'm not sure how the viewing speed and lack of problems are affected by the configuration of my computer. I have a very high-speed processor and 64 GB of RAM.