FamilySearchIndexing & RecordSearch Suggestion

I personally would like to see every application that displays scanned images to have a magnifying tool in its toolbox. This includes, for now, FamilySearchIndexing and Record Search. I will give a description of what I think would be quite valuable and valuable.

Click on the magnifying toolbar button to activate. Zooming in and out would still be available. However, if someone wanted to just zoom on a small area of the displayed image, they would press the mouse button down to zoom that area. When they are done, they would let go of that mouse. As they move the mouse around the image, they would also move the "magnifying glass" around. If the mouse is moved off of the image with the button still pressed, the image would automatically scroll in that direction.

As I have helped people use Indexing or Search, I find that they frequently are zooming in to see an area and then zoom back out to see a larger portion of the image. I firmly believe that the magnifying glass tool would save time for the users and even speed up processing of images to be Indexed (and speed up looking at Records being Searched).

I am new to the Record Search team, but would be happy to convey this suggestion to Tim Crabb and others at our next meeting.

Great, thank you.

Thomas: Second the motion on the magnifier - a great idea. I sent the below suggestion to the Indexing group but I guess they are too busy to implement. I will post it again here in hopes that some programmer might read it and understand how beneficial it could be to we in the trenches.........

Hi: Over the last 7,000 plus records indexed I have had many with poor exposure/clarity. Many unreadable names have been made readable by utilizing a combination of brightness and exposure but it is very time consuming and frustrating.

Could you check with the programmers to see if they could provide a little sub program that would automatically cycle through various combinations of brightness and contrast at some variable rate when requested via a drop down from the view menu? I am sure this would result in far more names becoming recognizable - a great asset to those doing research.

PS: Thomas - Have enjoyed your inputs/suggestions on the Insight blog for a long time.

Thank you for all of your comments. I have not ran into the same difficulty of exposure/clarity, but that sounds like a great idea. I too have sent in the request for the magnifier through several venues. Maybe with enough requests, it will raise in priority. Yeah, I still do Insight, but do not get to use it as much with the nFS system.