[Suggestion] Add a comment property to the Layer Properties

[midora]

Sometimes I like to add a comment to a layer but do not like to add it to the name.

So an additional layer property would help.

I'm not 100% sure if a change in the serialized part of pdn files would have no impact to old pdn versions. Rick knows this ,-)

 

The comment should allow multiple lines and the the UI should support a multiline control in the layer properties dialog.

I guess there is no need to show the comment in the layers panel (maybe just an indicator icon that there is a comment).

 

I would support this feature in the animated image file formats to place the animation commands in the comment property (and no longer after the separator // in the layer name).

[Rick Brewster]

There is already per-Layer metadata, but nothing's using it AFAIK. You can access it via the Layer.Metadata property from a FileType plugin.

 

But, there's no UI for accessing any metadata of any kind from any source, other than the resolution/DPI in Image->Canvas Size and Image->Resize.

[null54]

24 minutes ago, Rick Brewster said:

There is already per-Layer metadata, but nothing's using it AFAIK.

 

My Photoshop Brush FileType uses it to save the brush spacing values.

[midora]

I had in mind that there was a possibility to use metadata of files but had no idea that it was layer based. The question would be which file format supports what. I.e. I know there is XMP support for GIF but does MS really supports this extension? Who knows.

 

Anyway the comment feature would allow users to enter and edit information.

 

BTW: If Effect plugins could store some information in a layer using their name as a key then we could easily create an editable text plugin which doesn't depend on tricks like storing the information in the pixels (which is quite clever). Just as a temporary solution until we get paint.net 5 😉

[Rick Brewster]

AFAIK only .PDN supports per-layer metadata, and whatever @null54 has done.

 

Some file formats do support per-"frame" metadata (TIFF maybe?), but Paint.NET always puts these on the Document. And only the first frame is loaded anyway. And when per-frame metadata is supported, usually it's because the container does not support metadata. So I just normalize it to be on the Document.

[null54]

3 hours ago, midora said:

I know there is XMP support for GIF but does MS really supports this extension?

 

The built-in WIC codecs do not support XMP for PNG either.

 

When XMP data is used in a GIF, it is placed in an "application extension" block that is part of the container metadata.

AFAIK only Adobe's XMP toolkit supports reading/writing XMP with the GIF format.

[BoltBait]

1 hour ago, Rick Brewster said:

AFAIK only .PDN supports per-layer metadata

 

Man, I would LOVE for effects to have read/write access to the current layer's meta data.

[Rick Brewster]

On 11/17/2021 at 3:30 PM, Rick Brewster said:

AFAIK only .PDN supports per-layer metadata, and whatever @null54 has done.

 

Some file formats do support per-"frame" metadata (TIFF maybe?), but Paint.NET always puts these on the Document. And only the first frame is loaded anyway. And when per-frame metadata is supported, usually it's because the container does not support metadata. So I just normalize it to be on the Document.

 

As per WIC documentation for IWICBitmapDecoder::GetMetadataQueryReader() :

 

Quote

The only Windows provided image format that supports container-level metadata is GIF.

 

WIC uses the concepts of container and frame. These correspond to Document and Layer.

 

However, as I said, Paint.NET normalizes things to put the first frame's (layer's) metadata on the Document ("the container") when reading image data from WIC (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, JPEG XR, HEIC). And I don't think BMP supports metadata of any kind.

[midora]

I would like to add a storyboard feature to the animated filetypes (agif, apng, awebp, aavif) to avoid adding all the commands to the layer names.

The storyboard would be a multiline text referencing the layers by name (like it's done in the moment with the sprite feature).

It maybe stored as metadata in pdn files  But how to edit the storyboard ?