Media Tab, Search Box Disappears

I have seen a problem where the search box on the main Media tab disappears off and on for a very long time, and was just now able to reproduce it reliably.

  1. Start on the main People tab. I suspect that starting on other tabs would work as well, but this is the workflow I have been testing.
  2. Click the main Media tab. It defaults to Thumbnail View and the search box is present.
  3. Switch to List View and the search box is present.
  4. Switch back to Thumbnail View and the search box has disappeared.

At this point, I can get the search box to reappear by making the left hand panel unnaturally wide. I can get the search box to disappear again by making the left hand panel more narrow again.

There are numerous variations on this theme, but this exact scenario is the only one that I have found which displays the problem every single time. More typically, I will have filtered the media list using the search box and then gone over to the right hand panel to look at the media file. Upon returning to the left hand panel, the search box will have disappeared but the media list will still be filtered. Under these circumstances, it is impossible to clear the filter. What I have been doing to see the search box again has been to switch briefly to the main People tab and then back to the main Media tab.

I suspect but can’t test that the problem will manifest itself in different ways or not at all depending on the size of your monitor. Clearly what is happening is that the title bar in the left hand panel does not have enough space to display everything it needs to display, and sometimes what is being omitted from the display is the search box. If you have a larger monitor than mine, you might not be able to reproduce the problem. The title bar over the left hand panel needs to be redesigned to contain the search box at all times.

While I’m at it, I have asked many times for the main Media tab to remember that I have switched to List View and to remain in List View unless I myself switch it back to Thumbnail View. So if I go to Media => List View then to the main People tab and then back to Media, it still should be in List View. The fact that I’m always having to switch from Thumbnail View to List View seems to aggravate the problem of the search box disappearing. Please, please, please. Pretty please.

Agreed and, interestingly, the desired behavior is working on mac os (ie the previously selected media window view remains active when switching to “People” and then back to “Media”.)

I can force the media search bar to disappear when re-sizing the pane. I hadn’t noticed it before. I guess my media file names and captions are long enough that my default pane size avoids the issue.

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Interesting. I tried it again just now, and it worked as you described. This is great if it keeps doing that. Unless there was some strange user error, it wasn’t doing that a little while ago when I was doing a lot of work with media files.

Upon further review, I think the problem I was seeing earlier this morning was when I was looking at media from within Edit Person. From there, List Mode doesn’t seem to stick for media. What I was doing was highlighting a fact in Edit Person, clicking on Media, Select Existing Media. And that’s where it keeps going into Thumbnail mode. So I identified the problem correctly but the venue for the problem incorrectly. And I do most of my processing of media files from inside of Edit Person rather than from the main Media tab.

So my apologies for characterizing the behavior in the main Media tab incorrectly, and my “please, please, please” remains for the Thumbnail vs. List view sticking when looking at media from within Edit Person.

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