How to access the features

[SteveThackery]

I'm going to break normal etiquette by raising a discussion point for a second time. I promise that I won't pursue this any further if there are no responses.

First, I want to congratulate the author on PhotoDemon - I think it is just brilliant and the best open source software I have ever used. In particular I love how the user interface is so clean and elegant; it is simple and easy to use and the explanatory pop-ups are extremely helpful. Every aspect of the UI looks gorgeous. PhotoDemon stands head and shoulders above pretty much all the other open source software I have used, and most of the commercial software, too. :-) Thank you, thank you, for making it available free of charge! (Although I would happily pay for it.)

I do have something I would like to discuss. A very large part of the features and functions are accessed via menus. I accept that there is no other way of presenting such a large number of functions to the user. The downside is that two, three or more mouse clicks are needed to select items, especially on nested menus. It is unavoidable - menus are just like that. Also, it is often the case that a new user must search the menus to find what they want.

One solution is to use toolbars, much like the one on the left of the window. Unfortunately toolbars take up screen space, so not everyone likes them - especially experienced users who know the menus off by heart.

So, I have a suggestion: leave the menu system alone, but add to the software a number of toolbars which are hidden by default. And then allow users to show or hide them as they wish. I don't propose to put all the functions onto toolbars - that would be totally unrealistic. But perhaps a small number of toolbars that contain the most common features. For example, I suspect that the functions for adjusting the colours, brightness, etc of a photo are used a lot. So maybe a toolbar containing items 3 to 10 on the 'Adjustments' menu (they are already grouped on the menu). Or perhaps include the automatic adjustments, so items 1 to 10.

Another toolbar might contain the most popular items from the 'Effects' menu. I don't know what these would be, but I would probably suggest the most commonly used functions under 'Blur' and 'Sharpen', for example.

I've written Windows software in VB6 myself, and I suspect that a couple of simple toolbars that simply present a subset of the existing menu options should be doable without too much work, and crucially without breaking anything. And I repeat: these would be hidden by default so expert users won't be bothered by them.

I would love to hear the developer's views on this, as well as comments from anyone else who uses PhotoDemon. Thanks for your time.

[SteveThackery]

I've had another idea: all the functions around resizing would be a really useful toolbar. The attached screenshot shows the functions I mean.

[tannerhelland]

Hello @SteveThackery. Thank you for your kind words about PhotoDemon, and thank you for your thoughtful suggestions.

Please don't feel bad about not getting a personal reply. If you look at the Issues page for PhotoDemon, you can see that I get dozens upon dozens of feature requests (let alone what I get via email), and I struggle to reply to every bug report, let alone every feature request. This was especially true during the past few weeks, when I was trying to wrap up work on one last stable release before the year ended.

While it may not seem like it, UI features involving PhotoDemon's main window are always enormous projects. Toolbars in particular have to negotiate with the primary canvas for space, and these layout considerations represent a huge test matrix. For example, just off the top of my head...

• Does a new toolbar's positioning still work on a 1024x768 screen at 100/125/150% DPI (repeat for every possible resolution and DPI combination)?
• What if two optional toolbars are active, or 3/4/5? What order are they displayed in? How many do I allow simultaneously? Should display size or resolution affect this?
• What about when a canvas tool with no settings panel is active (Hand) vs one with tons of settings (Selections)? Does this affect where we place the toolbar, or whether the canvas still has enough space?
• What about when the user resizes the left or right-side panels on a tiny display, while a bunch of optional toolbars are active? Is the main canvas area still workable? How do we handle this?
• Toolbar buttons for image operations can have complex enabled states. (You wouldn't believe how much code is required for something trivial like "should the Save button be enabled?") How much code is required to decide when a given toolbar button should or should not be enabled?
• How do a bunch of active toolbars affect app startup time?
• Few of PhotoDemon's Adjustment Tools (and none of its Effect Tools) have dedicated icons, so artist would need to be hired or open-source images would need to be found for every potential toolbar button.
• Each icon needs to support light/dark/color/monochrome combinations.
• Icons need to scale correctly across different screen DPIs.
• Icons for filters and adjustments all represent challenging design considerations, e.g. what does a good Blur icon even look like? What about Brightness and Contrast vs Shadows and Highlights?
• Are there cultural considerations for any of these icons? How would I even research this?
• How much space do all these icons require? Did I accidentally blow up PhotoDemon's download size by adding hundreds of toolbar icons?
• Even if we do everything right and come up with clever icons that meet all these criteria, how many users in a given locales can even identify an Adjustment or Effect toolbar item by icon alone, vs a menu where I can at least display a localized name? Could expert users even differentiate between a Color balance and Vibrance icon?

These decisions quickly compound, and for toolbars hidden by default (meaning 99+% of users may never see or interact with them), you can imagine my reluctance to tackle a project like this. There is a lot to consider.

Honestly, I also don't love how menu-heavy PhotoDemon is at present. If I had unlimited spare time, I'd love to at least make the left toolbar user-editable, so that users could add their own buttons and groups, and hide existing buttons if they don't need them. This has all the same problems mentioned above, but because users would have full control over what goes there, I wouldn't have to make random guesses about things like "what filters are most popular" or "how many active toolbars are too many". I also already have code in place for negotiating left-side panel behavior against the canvas, which solves some problems. The various icon-related issues remain, however. (A dedicated artist for the project would help a lot - maybe someday!)

I hope this doesn't sound too discouraging. I try to never say "never" to a feature request unless there is an unavoidable technical problem that prevents it, but given the myriad of other, more pressing issues I face with PhotoDemon development, I'm afraid I don't currently foresee a set of "hidden, optional toolbars" happening any time soon.

I am always open to persuasion, however, especially if people have ideas and/or concepts for simpler implementations that wouldn't require a ton of work on my end. I'm just one developer trying to support a project like this in his free time, across dozens of languages and 25 years of Windows operating systems. It sometimes feels like too much!

Regardless, thank you again for your feedback and kind words. I hope this helps explain some of the reasoning behind the current UI, and hopefully further improvements will come in 2026, even if they're not necessarily in the form of toolbars.

[SteveThackery]

Hello Tanner, And thank you so much for taking the time to write such a great response - I appreciate it enormously. I did think about the challenge of creating all those icons, which certainly would be a challenging task: icons which are meaningful to (almost) everyone, which scale nicely, which don't contravene anyone's copyright, and so on. In retrospect I definitely underestimated the amount of work that would involve. Having considered all the points you make, I have changed my mind - I don't think toolbars would be worth the considerable effort involved. So, I hereby withdraw my suggestion. 😁 I've been a Paint Shop Pro user for decades, but in recent years it has become horribly bloated and sluggish. I no longer love it and am looking for an alternative. PhotoDemon is by far my favourite option. Truly, it is a joy to use in every way. The "menu-heaviness" is really not a problem with the software, it's a problem with this particular user. I've decided to work on that - perhaps making the effort to learn the shortcut keys, which I believe would be a good alternative to toolbars. Thank you once again for producing PhotoDemon - it is a beautiful piece of work.  With kind regards, Steve