Whirp works, more or less, but it has enough shortcomings that one who is not familiar with it will find it troublesome. The notes below explain how it works and some of its rules and shortcomings. Be sure to read about "actionable" fields. There are four images below; those that are greatly shrunk will get bigger if you click on them.

The first screen invites you to select the drive on which to look for media files after sensing what drives are mounted. This enables one to serve any number of projects or clients using multiple removeable hard drives.

Now that you've selected a drive, the second screen invites you to select a folder among those you've processed before or to browse for a new folder to be enrolled. Obviously, this applies only to the drive that was selected in step 1.

If you select a folder that has videos, the third screen let's you select one. If you select a folder that has photos, it presents the table of evaluation and documentation assuming you can see elsewhere which photos go with which file name. We need a way to display photos; perhaps by bringing up Windows Explorer for the folder that has been selected.

Then the last screen let's you change the evaluation or documentation of the media item that has been selected.

1. "Actionable" is a very important word. Screen 2 does not allow you to edit, merely to select. To select an media item you must click on an "actionable" field for that image. (gvCell triggers the choice). If you are editing data, you can only edit "actionable" fields.
2. Quality ratings allow media to be ranked and/or selected for many purposes, so they are important. Here are the break points for Quality ratings (as Carl has assigned them for his purposes):
   • Quality less than 4000 means it was determined by the size of the file, no human judgement was involved : ImageQualityAlgorithm
   • Quality equal to 4001 means it should be erased, has been evaluated and found not worth keeping
   • Quality greater than or equal to 4085 is very, very good, gets put on special list: criteria for inclusion in "BestImages"
   • Max quality so far is 4099, leaving lots of room for finding better media or for inflating current rankings.
3. iTunes does such a good job with music that we may not do much with music here. iTunes claims to also handle videos, but the number of formats available is very limited.

1. We don't yet have a satisfactory general implementation of the apl grid control We're experimenting with two: Carl adapted one written by Bill Parke for the zqGrid grid control and built PopUpG from Davin Church's PopUp utility.
2. We don't know how to make certain fields non-editable in the PopUpG grid control, so all fields are "actionable". Thus the notation of what fields are "actionable" is misleading when we are using the PopUpG grid control.
3. We have excellent flexibility on buttons with the PopUpG grid control, but we haven't fully thought out what they should be. We don't yet have much flexibility with buttons on the zqGrid grid control.
4. We'd like to have a player to which we can directly give a playlist under apl control. Whirp can "play" or "show" media one item at a time using "SHELL-EXECUTE", but we don't know how to play items successively like a player plays a playlist (we don't know how to figure out how long to allow an item to play before starting the next item). If we can't do that, we'll create playlists and let third party media players play them.
5. Screen #2 needs a comment field and "#files" should be moved over so that it is just to the left of : #photos #videos #tunes.
6. In addition to playing media, we should also be able to "play" html pages. We can place an html link to a YouTube video in a table of videos and it will play when we click on it. So I'd guess we can bring up html pages; we'll need to experiment more on this.
7. Timestamps are shown in SECBASE format; easy for sorting but not easy for humans to read.