Expansion of nViz Metadata Identification Options #62
Description
This is similar to #61. When converting 2D tiff images within a directory the filenames must follow a specific naming structure so z-slices and channels are recognized correctly in the Napari viewer. From my understanding the channel name must be the value after the first underscore, and the z-slice order of a channel is determined by the sort function. I don't think it's feasible to accommodate every possible file naming structure, but maybe it would be possible to get close by giving the user an option to specify a regex expression. From my experience people tend to avoid regex so this option might not be very useful. I think there is one other useful way the metadata could be identified. I think including any other options would yield smaller marginal gains. This position-agnostic option is described below:
Allow the user to pass in a tidy-long manifest (such as a csv or parquet file) to specify the metadata of each file (one file path per row). This would liberate the user from following a positional structure, such as in the case of a filename, and instead allow the user to create their own mapping (from their current file structure to the manifest) without being dependent on a pre-defined file structure. The documentation could then specify the column names (and any accepted variations) required (e.g. "channel", "z-slice") for nViz to recognize the corresponding metadata from the manifest file.