[enhancement]: My experience with and suggestions for the image viewer UX

[lerocox]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Contact Details

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What should this feature add?

Right now when you open the canvas you have the image viewer:

This kinda makes sense, you click the X to get rid of it, but once you do that, you get this:

Once I got to this point I got stuck pretty badly and wasn't sure what to do. My first instinct looking for "I want to see images again" was to click the picture again in the gallery.

This does nothing. It may be useful to make a gallery click open the image viewer back up.

My second instinct was to click the picture button.

This picture button closes the left side panel. (This made me laugh out loud when I first clicked it and the right panel closed. Maybe it is intuitive for others, but I did NOT expect that to happen)

I believe this button should

1 - be closer to and merged with the right panel to provide a more intuitive connection between them.

2 - be dropped to a less important area (maybe at the bottom of the panel as a much smaller button?)

3 - feature a "closing arrow" type icon like a "->"

And I believe a similar button to the current "image button" should be put near the top of the cavnas, and that button should open the image viewer. Or the current button could even remain where it is open the image viewer.

I did eventually discover the actual button.

In the top right, but the way it is sort of tucked away, not clearly connected to the image view panel, and it took me a little while to find it/realize it opens the image viewer.

The left side closing button has a similar issue, but not nearly as severe. It looks like a button you would click to toggle on some list of sliders. Instead, it closes the left side panel. I would do something similar, making it a "<-" and maybe sticking it in the bottom "merged" with the left side to indicate a connection

Alternatives

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Additional Content

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[hipsterusername]

All good feedback. Thanks for the raw first time user experience!

FWIW, as unintuitive as it may be, double clicking an image in the gallery opens the viewer to that image - there’s also a button at the top of the image on hovering that does this as well.

🫡