Can we rate our images?

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Truthowl
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri May 18, 2018 9:04 pm

Can we rate our images?

Post by Truthowl »

A couple years back I found WSP when I bought a new computer and had trouble getting my old Wallpaper Master Pro to work on the newer Operating System. It seemed to do everything I wanted so I bought it. Then a few days later I discovered it did NOT do one extremely important thing. It didn't have a screensaver function.

See, Wallpaper Master Pro had a built in Screensaver function. We created categories and added photo's to those categories. Then you could change your OS screensaver to "Wallpaper Master" and whichever category you were in it would start a slideshow screensaver with just those photo's. But that's not all. You could rate each wallpaper with Hotkeys or via a selection box. When the "Wallpaper Master" screensaver activated it would give more preference to higher rated photo's. It also allowed us to use the rating Hotkey's while the screensaver was running. So I could sit here with say a 5-10 second slide duration timer and rapidly rate photo's. I absolutely LOVED that functionality.

When I discovered your WSP did not do that I quit using WSP and even regretted buying it. So I searched and found my backup copy of Wallpaper Master Pro and my license key. That worked fine. Hell, I didn't want to change my OS because I knew my favorite app wouldn't work on it and the Developer of Wallpaper Master Pro, James Gart, had apparently died.

Now I'm kind of in the same boat. I just upgraded my OS to Windows 10 a few days ago. Now, today, I started feeling the lack of Wallpaper Master Pro and decided to dig out my old files and info. In the process I found my purchase info for your WSP. I had forgotten why I never used it. So I tired it out and it all came rushing back. I almost unistalled but I thought since it had been a long time since I bought this maybe you had added a similar functionality. I think that's kind of what 'Weight' is isn't it? A HIGHER weighted image will get used more frequently than lower weighted images.

If that is what it does could you please add hotkeys for rating images for 1-5 stars? Please?
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gpb
Site Admin
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Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2011 1:23 am

Re: Can we rate our images?

Post by gpb »

I really don't understand which is the point, can you please make a summary of your feature request ?

About rating, WallpaperSS can't set star rating to images because it doesn't have the code to do it in a safe way. I mean touching original images can damage them. WallpaperSS allows you to run external tools, you can install ExifTool and use it to rate your images.
See this FAQ
Gianpaolo Bottin
gPhotoShow.com
Truthowl
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri May 18, 2018 9:04 pm

Re: Can we rate our images?

Post by Truthowl »

What I would like is to be able to rate each of my images individually, using hotkeys. Then have WallpaperSS use the ratings to determine the frequency at which each image will be used as the current Wallpaper.

A way to do this with the restrictions Windows 10 has, would be to create a list with the name of each wallpaper, and it's rating, as a text file, for example. When the list is created each image is rated as a 3, in a scale of 1-5. That would be a medium, or average, rating. Then at the set interval, WallpaperSS would check which image was next and set it. You might need to create several lists. One for each rating and then 1 Master List. You could probably do most of it using a multidimensional array. By using saved/stored lists WallpaperSS does not need to take up a lot of memory, most of the time, and when it accesses a list it only needs to load the list relevant to the rating it has chosen. Then it chooses a random image from that selected rating.

If this was implemented we could then set our change interval rather short so WallpaperSS would change wallpapers quicker and we can use our set Hotkeys to rate them. Then we could change our interval back to our preferred standard interval and we'd get our images rated 5 more frequently than our images rated 3. And rating 3 image would appear more frequently than rating 1. In this way all the images we have will, sooner or later, get a chance to be displayed, but, our most cherished images show up more often.

I hope this helps explain what I'm hoping for. If you want more info let me know.
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gpb
Site Admin
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Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2011 1:23 am

Re: Can we rate our images?

Post by gpb »

What you suggest is already implemented in a standard way.
WallpaperSS use existing standards to read ratings from pictures and you can set a weight for specific ratings, if pictures with rating 5 have a weight of 100 they will be displayed 100 times more often that other pictures.
There are tons of programs that allows you to rate pictures (also windows file explorer can do it) there is no need invent another wheel but if you really want to do it from WallpaperSS you can see this FAQ from gPhotoShow and do the same in WallpaperSS
Gianpaolo Bottin
gPhotoShow.com
Truthowl
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri May 18, 2018 9:04 pm

Re: Can we rate our images?

Post by Truthowl »

Thank you for the information and the consideration. I'll read up on it as soon as I can.
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