Almost all of my dataview tables, from roller coasters I’ve been on to board games that I own and movies I’ve seen, include an image of the thing in question. I would love to replace these tables with Bases. But that visual appeal of an image isn’t available. I would like some way to make an image appear in a Base.
Proposed solution
I can think of a few possible solutions:
A Base formula that accepts a string linking to an image that tells the Base that this is a reference to an image and to display it as such. This link could be a link in the vault to an image or a url to an external image that also accepts an image size.
The ability to right-click a column and select an option to render the string in that column as an image, maybe including some additional options to set the image size.
A new “Image” property type that accepts a link to an image.
May I suggest a more general solution than to define a specifically named YAML property‽
How about selecting the way the property should be displayed? Under the “Properties” dropdown, there’s already the “Edit Property” menu. And there’s a “Property Type” dropdown… which doesn’t do anything currently (you can’t change it). Maybe this dropdown, or one named “Property Display Type”, could be used to define views.
That dropdown could have types like “image”, maybe with extra options like the display-size of the image.
Advantages:
It would give users the freedom of naming (I currently use “thumbnail” as property name).
…thereby it would also allow adding several images to each note. Because maybe I want one image for thumbnails, one for a fancy title or color swam or whatever.
more common views could be added. Maybe even videos. Or ratings as in another suggestion… with the choice for neat 5-star-ratings or out-of-10 ratings.
the extra options would allow also a flag for whether the image should be displayed as image or link
that could also help with sorting… sometimes I want empty properties at the top, sometimes at the bottom.
Anyways, displaying images is definitely something the bases need. I use it via Dataview for nearly all notes.
I am not sure how image rendering would work in the table view. I agree that all the above idea belong to a gallery view that need to be implemented first. So please continue the convo in that thread.
Here is how I currently get them with Dataview. Works well for visual items like paintings (it could be even nicer with standard sizes). This still allows easy sorting.
So I would see the image rendering as first essential step. And then adding the gallery mode via a grid view arrangement. Those are not necessarily dependent features
I disagree. And I’d suggest that’s up to the users requesting the feature.
For a long time, the community plugin Projects wasn’t able to display images except in gallery mode, but I very much wanted to view images in a table or Kanban view (which was eventually possible). I almost certainly have no use for a gallery view.
So if the plan for gallery mode is just a grid of pictures (with some optional data below the images), then please take the feedback that images in tables (including formulas that generate images) would be very useful.
(Dev’s choice to implement it or not. But closing this thread seems premature.)
Throwing in my two cents. I don’t think a gallery view works for most of my use cases. I want to be able to display an entire row of information that would just not fit into a single cell.
1 Nowadays, most of the material tools have a super important problem! That is, they don’t support customizing the table view, and they also don’t allow us to carry out custom editing! Just think about it, when there are a whole lot of tags, all the classification tags will be crowded together all at once! For example, color tags, style tags, scene tags, composition tags, etc. On the table, they should be separated and each become a separate column! Just like when we use a table (excel,dataview,google sheets) to manage note texts, or like the clear presentation methods in project management and version control!
2 Table view can be used for digital assets versioning control .
+1 to support images in the table view (ideally with a max width and height cell).
The Gallery view will be nice for certain data-light use cases, but often a table is better to show a dense table with 1+ column containing an image.
