image preview usability & performance suggestions

[wat]

hey there, so I've been using (and recommending) your Duplicate Cleaner for a while now, mostly for weeding out duplicate images, and I've noticed a number of little annoyances and simple potential improvements.


image preview (mostly usability):

1. - add mouse wheel support for zooming (wheel down -> zoom out, wheel up -> zoom in)

2. - use a logarithmic scale for zooming

3. - center images in preview window instead of aligning them to the left

4. - right now the small and large change values of the scrollbar are pretty useless (both 1 pixel), would be better to have something like small (click on arrow) = 1/5 current screen width/height (taking zoom into account); large (click on scrollbar outside the slider) = screen width/height (also taking zoom into account)

5.* - use filtering in image preview, would help with scans / pictures with screening (bilinear or maybe gauss instead of point resizing, via gdi/dx functions, possibly using System.Drawing in .NET)

6.* - update the image while dragging it around (panning using the mouse), just a couple fps, no need for it to be smooth


result table related (mostly performance):

7. - abort image decoding as soon as the user clicks on / navigates to another file (currently the program will remember decode every single image you click on while waiting for it to become responsive again)

8. - do not re-decode the currently displayed image upon double clicking

9. - do not decode image files if the user only (un)ticks the checkbox in front of a line without actually selecting a different image than the one currently displayed

10.* - do not block main window while decoding / displaying images

11.* - do not re-decode/re-display image files every time if the user selects another entry in the same group of dupes, though that's not 100% safe from a dupe checking point of view)

12.* - update the preview window while decoding / displaying images (every 0.5s or so?)


(* = optional and/or presumably better suited for inclusion in version 2.0 rather than 1.4.x due to the amount of effort required)


currently it's like "tick three dupes of a large PNG -> wait several seconds for the program to become responsive again" which can be very annoying when going through more than a handful images.

please ask for clarification if any of this is unclear.

also thank you for your already very useful program, and here's to a 2.0 that'll make it perfect. I for one am very much looking forward to the unicode support.

(hope this doesn't turn into a formatting clusterfuck after posting...)

[DV]

Great image suggestions, thanks. I'd like to try and implement some but my priority is getting 2.0 finished and released with basic image viewing features, and then to build on it. I will keep these suggestions in mind though.

I will test and implement your suggestions about the unnecessary re-loading of identical images though -good idea.