What's the workflow in the GUI?

[trebonius]

I'm working with videos, and the indexing and match finding parts are reasonably well documented, but then the GUI opens and there's no documentation I can find other than pointing out where I can change keyboard shortcuts. While I found the context menu, and that has helped me explore a bit, I don't know how to make good use of the GUI. There are some things that are not defined as far as I can tell, so I don't actually know what they do.

Some of the things that stand out most as mysteries are in the tagging section. What is "good" and "bad" match tagging, and what is negative match tagging? I've tried experimenting with them, but I can't see anything happening, other than moving to the next match set. What am I tagging -- the match set, or a particular video? And what can I do after they're tagged in these ways?

[scrubbbbs]

Yes, there is no documentation yet for the GUi part. I guess things have stabilized enough to write some documentation on it. Perhaps you would like to contribute?

While I found the context menu, and that has helped me explore a bit

All available actions are in the context menu.

What is "good" and "bad" match tagging,

This is mostly useless. It creates a csv file for testing cbird; e.g. you can go through a bunch of results and mark each one as good or bad and it saves that to a csv file. Later that file can be used to test cbird or for whatever external program.

what is negative match tagging

This is for marking false matches so they don't keep showing. You use this in conjunction with -p.neg true (default false) to remove them from search results. You can associate the selected image with the first image, (-) or associate all images (in the current view) with the first image (Shift+-). Files are tagged using their checksum so the tag is retained if files are renamed or even deleted and added back.

For commands that use pairs of items (like negative tagging, template match, compare videos etc), the selected item and first item makeup the pair. The first image is (by default) the needle of the search query, though this can change by rotating the view or deleting files.

[trebonius]

Super helpful and clear, thanks. I'd be open to contributing some documentation. I'll see what I can come up with.

[trebonius]

Some additional questions about the GUI if you don't mind.
Working from top down on the screen.

1. Above each media item appear to be 3 pipe-separated values. A percentage, and then I think the next two are always "-" and "Qt" for me. What are those?
2. Below the media items, next to the file name are some numbers. The needle just has one, like [x33], the other items have a similar number and in parentheses, what appears to be the difference between it and the needle. like [x30] (-3). What do those represent?
3. The dots. What do the color and number of dots represent?
4. I think I understand most of the numbers below, with the exception of what always appears to be "0.0:1" (maybe I'm not using a feature this represents?) and the s-numbers. Needle is always s-1, other items are some positive number like s16.

[trebonius]

Ah, I think the [x33] numbers must be number of files in the directory with that particular item, right?

[scrubbbbs]

Some additional questions about the GUI if you don't mind. Working from top down on the screen.

1. Above each media item appear to be 3 pipe-separated values. A percentage, and then I think the next two are always "-" and "Qt" for me. What are those?

They describe the display parameters of the image; % is the scale factor, "Qt" is the scaling filter (there is a key to cycle the filter). There may be a rotation angle if the image was rotated by template matcher.

2. Below the media items, next to the file name are some numbers. The needle just has one, like [x33], the other items have a similar number and in parentheses, what appears to be the difference between it and the needle. like [x30] (-3). What do those represent?

The "xNUM" is usually counting how many files are in the same directory or zipfile.

3. The dots. What do the color and number of dots represent?

The colors help to see relative differences between files. We are comparing the file to the needle; you'll notice the first file (needle) is always blue or gray text.

The blue color means the value is nearly identical vs the needle, green means more/better, red means less/worse and the number of dots give a quick indication of how much difference there is, with one dot being no difference/little difference. So its a quick visual to help decide which file to delete.

4. I think I understand most of the numbers below, with the exception of what always appears to be "0.0:1" (maybe I'm not using a feature this represents?) and the s-numbers. Needle is always s-1, other items are some positive number like s16.

The sNUM is the match score. "0.0:1" is the compression ratio of the file.

There is one more you missed, if you press "Q" then you get two more values in the lower right, The upper one is for jpeg only and estimates the quality setting in the encoder (0-100). The bottom one is a no-reference image quality metric, meaning it does not compare to any other image (unlike SSIM/PSNR/VMAF) but scores based on detecting of things that look bad like blocking, blur, and noise.