Feature idea: picture previews above an image should show collection/pool instead of family

Right now:

• danbooru has collections/pools and parent+child relationship for grouping related pictures together
• on a post page above the main image there are previews of the family of a picture (parent or children if there are any, and other family members)
• the intended usage according to the rules is that comics should get their own pool. High ranking members claim that for small comics parent+children is OK, and I think that's the usage in practice

The problems:

• reading a comic/sequence of images is somewhat clunky and unintuitive, both when it is in a pool, and when it is organized as a parent + children
• a pool has no previews
• parent+children is very fragile, and any later addition to any picture (new kid, new parent etc) ruins it
• people organize small comics as parent+children because it has a better viewer

My ideal solution:

• make the viewing experience for pools better
• e.g. put the previews of the surrounding images in the active pool above the image, and the parent+children relations below the image
• also this is how image viewers usually work, they show the previous/next images above or below the main image

+1

Any proposal that urges people to use pools more instead of haphazardly using the already overused Parent/Child system to stitch them together has my support. I've ranted about this before a few times before including several of the points mentioned above (forum #306473, forum #228223) and I currently can't be bothered to do it again.

I'm aware that there has been a slight push to move pools to tags, but for any form of sequential art pools ought to be the standard.

Even if nothing else changes, adding a thumbnail navigator to the pool header would vastly improve the browsing experience.
Crappy mockup:

If such a feature were to be added, there should be an easily accessible option on the post's page to toggle the pool preview menu on or off, especially if it's going to be at the top of the page. Some people would almost certainly prefer going through one page at a time without seeing the other pages whether to avoid spoilers or just for the general experience.

The prerequisite to this is phasing out collection pools and adding more restrictions on series pools. Otherwise most of the screen gets filled with previews and toolbars and you can't even see the picture without scrolling down.

Currently in the worst case a post can have:

• Multiple series pools (e.g. post #9419162, post #6903807), each of which can contain hundreds or thousands of posts (e.g. pool #26125, pool #2420)
• Multiple collection pools (e.g. post #4934189)
• Multiple personal favgroups.
• A parent post with multiple sibling posts
• Multiple child posts
• The "Resized to xx% of original" notice
• The pending approval notice
• The tag search navbar

post #4076184 for example would have 4 rows of thumbnails because it has a parent post, child post, and two series pools.

At a minimum, posts that are in multiple series pools need to be fixed to only go in one pool. You can find posts like this with series_pool_count:>1 order:none.

Series pools also need to be limited to some reasonable size. Meaning these pools with thousands of posts need to be manually broken up into smaller pools. You can't reasonably navigate a pool when you're trying to horizontally scroll through thousands of thumbnails.

We also need more people working on converting collection pools into actual tags. There are too many cases like post #4934189 where a post is part of a comic and a bunch of other collection pools that are just glorified tags. I'm considering moving collection pools to beneath the tag list and displaying them like normal tags just to avoid this problem where a big part of the screen is taken up by pools.

evazion said:

Series pools also need to be limited to some reasonable size. Meaning these pools with thousands of posts need to be manually broken up into smaller pools. You can't reasonably navigate a pool when you're trying to horizontally scroll through thousands of thumbnails.

This is only a problem if we're trying to preview the entire pool, and I don’t know why we would do that. At most, only previews for the images immediately before and after the currently viewed post need to displayed. Anything more than that bloats the post page.

Breaking up pools also introduces issues with the user experience. If there's no logical break points, like separate chapters, then we're just breaking them up arbitrarily, and forcing users to navigate to another page to figure out how to continue the comic, or potentially misleading them into thinking that's just where the comic ends.

Also, semi-relevant, I don't know why the Dairi pool is a series pool. Besides the fact it's supposed to be broken up whenever the spam ends, which is apparently never, it always should've been a collection pool. Just because it's technically organized in a logical order doesn't mean it has any value as a sequential viewing experience.

evazion said:

The prerequisite to this is phasing out collection pools and adding more restrictions on series pools. Otherwise most of the screen gets filled with previews and toolbars and you can't even see the picture without scrolling down.

When you view a picture you are in at most 1 active collection already, with 'a' and 'd' switching to the prev/next picture. If danbooru showed the 5 pictures around the current one, that would work.

evazion said:

We also need more people working on converting collection pools into actual tags. There are too many cases like post #4934189 where a post is part of a comic and a bunch of other collection pools that are just glorified tags. I'm considering moving collection pools to beneath the tag list and displaying them like normal tags just to avoid this problem where a big part of the screen is taken up by pools.

Hm...While the shift has been subtle, I've been part of quite a few efforts to convert collection pools to tags so far. One of the big things I noticed is that when not highly subjective, they are often tropes like "You Need a Vacation" or "Mundane Made Awesome". But my big concern is with the pools for concepts that would actively struggle outside the pool system (the biggest one I'm concerned with is pool #20151, which is rather popular, but any attempt to tag convert it would run into the heavy risk of dreaded tag dilution (which is why my proposal for a "mixed-sex focus" tag in topic #32596 fell through in the past, but it cannot be reworked into a series pool for what I hope are rather obvious reasons).

Would it not hurt to start a thread for general collection pool to tag conversions? So far topic #8282 has served as the main thread for this recently, but as that thread is supposed to be for nuking essentially favgroups and abysmal pool concepts, it might not hurt to have a thread just for discussing those. I imagine there are some cases like the aforementioned pool #20151 would have to remain as collection pools (which this shift could benefit), but there's a lot that can either be flatout nuked or converted to tags, which ought to be done first if we make this shift.

evazion said:

Series pools also need to be limited to some reasonable size. Meaning these pools with thousands of posts need to be manually broken up into smaller pools. You can't reasonably navigate a pool when you're trying to horizontally scroll through thousands of thumbnails.

I understand this to an extent, but I have no clue how something like pool #23817 would be split without it being completely arbitrary and also making searching harder for an average user.

Ylimegirl said:

I understand this to an extent, but I have no clue how something like pool #23817 would be split without it being completely arbitrary and also making searching harder for an average user.

Shouldn’t that be a collection pool? It's a collection of posts with no apparent sequential value. The series category is intended for pools that are intended to be viewed in a certain order, like a comic.

Would it be feasible to allow the creation of sub pools as a built-in feature? For example, a pool containing a chaptered comic could have a sub pool for each chapter. The number of posts in both the main pool and sub pool could be displayed somewhere on the post page (that is, you shouldn't have to hover your cursor over the pool link to know how far in the pool you are). That way, the user will know when they're nearing the end of a chapter while still knowing how far they are in the main pool. It should also make the large comic pools easier to manage.

I'm sure we don't want a bunch of nested sub pools, so I'd limit it to one level. I don't think there'd be too many situations in which we'd need more than that.

blindVigil said:

Shouldn’t that be a collection pool? It's a collection of posts with no apparent sequential value. The series category is intended for pools that are intended to be viewed in a certain order, like a comic.

Pools like that are functionally akin to artbooks, and there are tons of pools in the series category in that fashion coalescing official art, whether they be character renders, CD covers, emotes, etc (or, in this case, a type of card in a game, sorted in the ID order of said cards). Whether or not such pools should exist to begin with, especially under stricter requirements per evazion's comments, is a different question.

I guess you could use the "convert-to-tag as they are objective concepts" logic on those pools, but Idk how strong that'd hold considering you'd inevitably end up with mock-ups people made for fun in those tags meant for the official thing.

GabrielWB said:

Crappy mockup:

I think that any sort of proposal like this would have to abandon having continuous thumbnails like parent/child and stick to a set number of thumbnails (indicating previous and next posts, whether it be only one of each or two).

evazion said:

The prerequisite to this is phasing out collection pools and adding more restrictions on series pools. Otherwise most of the screen gets filled with previews and toolbars and you can't even see the picture without scrolling down.

Series pools also need to be limited to some reasonable size. Meaning these pools with thousands of posts need to be manually broken up into smaller pools. You can't reasonably navigate a pool when you're trying to horizontally scroll through thousands of thumbnails.

If we're putting higher standards on series pools, then we could add chapter functionality to them.

Pools such as #2 on that list, Hang in There Kogasa-san (pool #2420), have quasi-chapter selects, allowing one to easily just to a specific serial story Mizuki shared about his life, but to access any of them requires one to open the pool to access the description. Imagine instead, when editing a pool or making a new one, there's a new section allowing one to set-up where chapters start (add post ID here) and what the chapter is called. After setting it up, this can aid pool navigation in two major ways: when looking at a pool itself, there's now a button that will take you to the pool page where the start of a given chapter is, so you don't have to scroll through several pool pages to find the one you want and find that one specific page you're looking for; when looking at a specific post, you can look up at the pool overlay (which I suggested limiting the thumbnails for down to 2 or 4), and you'll find beneath the centered pool name a drop-down menu, which you can open and pick whichever chapter you want to go to. Pressing » next to the drop-down menu would then take you straight to the first post of that pool.

All of this would improve pool navigability significantly, and also make it more apparent that pools are intended for things such as comics.

Even outside

Damian0358 said:

If we're putting higher standards on series pools, then we could add chapter functionality to them.

Pools such as #2 on that list, Hang in There Kogasa-san (pool #2420), have quasi-chapter selects, allowing one to easily just to a specific serial story Mizuki shared about his life, but to access any of them requires one to open the pool to access the description. Imagine instead, when editing a pool or making a new one, there's a new section allowing one to set-up where chapters start (add post ID here) and what the chapter is called. After setting it up, this can aid pool navigation in two major ways: when looking at a pool itself, there's now a button that will take you to the pool page where the start of a given chapter is, so you don't have to scroll through several pool pages to find the one you want and find that one specific page you're looking for; when looking at a specific post, you can look up at the pool overlay (which I suggested limiting the thumbnails for down to 2 or 4), and you'll find beneath the centered pool name a drop-down menu, which you can open and pick whichever chapter you want to go to. Pressing » next to the drop-down menu would then take you straight to the first post of that pool.

All of this would improve pool navigability significantly, and also make it more apparent that pools are intended for things such as comics.

Oh my god, even outside comic chapter functionality, it'd improve the series pools that are categoried by, say, rarity in-game or by waves of released art (the example of this I attend to is the Community Emotes of Infinity Nikki, but there are other examples). I'm honestly much more interested in this becoming a feature than the topic of this thread existing.

Damian0358 said:

I think that any sort of proposal like this would have to abandon having continuous thumbnails like parent/child and stick to a set number of thumbnails (indicating previous and next posts, whether it be only one of each or two).

If we're putting higher standards on series pools, then we could add chapter functionality to them.

This sounds like it's getting into full blown manga/comic reader territory...

Which I'm all for actually. I feel like it'd fix or avoid quite a few of the problems being ran into here.

evazion said:

The prerequisite to this is phasing out collection pools and adding more restrictions on series pools. Otherwise most of the screen gets filled with previews and toolbars and you can't even see the picture without scrolling down.

• Multiple collection pools (e.g. post #4934189)

We also need more people working on converting collection pools into actual tags. There are too many cases like post #4934189 where a post is part of a comic and a bunch of other collection pools that are just glorified tags. I'm considering moving collection pools to beneath the tag list and displaying them like normal tags just to avoid this problem where a big part of the screen is taken up by pools.

Why would we need preview for collection pools? This sounds like a feature for series pools.

magcolo said:

Why would we need preview for collection pools? This sounds like a feature for series pools.

Because, based on evazion's words, implementing pool previews would likely be done in a pool-category-agnostic, so both collection pools and series pools would have them. This comes from his perspective that collection pools need to be phased out, and that series pools would be the only kind of pools to begin with (and with that sort of narrowing, you'd need more restrictions put in place to explicitly avoid the circumstances that allowed collection pools to exist in the first place). So you need to kill collection pools first before pool previews can be implemented. Had he wanted collection pools to stay around, making pool previews a series-category-exclusive feature would be in the cards, but he doesn't.

Collection pools wouldn't have previews. But if it doesn't make sense for something to have previews and navigation, then it shouldn't be a pool to begin with. Pools are for things that need navigation; tags are for things that don't.

The issue is that collection pools take up too much space in the UI. OP's suggestion was to put pool navigation above the image. That makes sense for series pools, but if collection pools go above the image too, then it takes too much space away from the image, especially if a post is in multiple collection pools. If they go somewhere else, then it's confusing because you have pools in two different places.

Actually there already is an account option to put pool navigation above the image, and it used to be the default. The only reason it goes below the image now is that it takes up too much space when a post is in multiple collection pools.