Request: Collapse Tags

I find the Tags feature really helpful to organize my animations. However, when recently upping the amount of frames requires me to side-scroll due to having 80+ frames per file.

Suggesting here that maybe have a collapse function or similar to how the folder works for layers.

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Seconding this! I never even thought of this feature but it would make things so much nicer when dealing with many animations.

How would tag-collapsing affect overlapping tags, though? For example, it’s possible to have Tag A be frames 1-5, and Tag B be frames 3-6. How should collapsing Tag A affect the appearance of Tag B and vice versa?

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You’re a mastermind :astonished:

My timelines get unruly rather quickly. +1

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I’m thinking that a collapsed Tag would either collapse down to one or zero frames, indicated with a thicker/striped line or just a bigger space between the frames. With overlapping example, I’d say that it would probably work collapsing the parts that don’t overlap. Collapsing A would still have frames 3-5 uncollapsed since they are a part of B and vice versa.

I haven’t given it that much thought to be honest :slight_smile: I’m sure there are better solutions than my example

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I usually work with really large files, more than 200 frames, sometimes it gets very confusing. One thing that would definitely help would be the ability to collapse a loop.
Here’s a really quick mockup of what I think it would be ideal:
image

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That would be really nice, the timeline it won’t be so large with long animations c:

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+1. Being able to collapse some of my tags would make referring to certain early frames so much quicker.

That’s a great idea @saint11, actually there are several plans to improve the handling of tags on v1.3 (like drag-and-drop of the whole tag, or just dragging borders, etc.). This collapse/expand would be a nice thing to have too :+1:

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I remember this feature from here too:

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It would be nice to be able to collapse and expand tags.

I see that someone already mentioned this, however I already made an image, so I may as well post it anyway!

min

On some of my projects, I have a collection of several animations in a single .ase file, and some of the animations are very long. I also like to keep my timeline anchored to the right instead of the bottom because vertical space is more important to me for my workflow, so I’m constantly fighting a screen real-estate battle. For other Right- or Left-mounted timeline people like myself, there’s not a huge amount of horizontal room on the timeline even when fully zoomed out, especially on larger projects.

I made a few quick and dirty mockups. In trying to do so I realized this would bring up a lot more questions and involve innumerable unforeseen UI problems (go figure, right?). For instance, how do you show the status of the cells inside of the hidden frames, if at all? And how about other tags that extend partway into a collapsed section, etc.?

In my opinion it would be kind of sloppy, hacky, irresponsible to make a bunch of weird exception cases for situations where the other tags do or don’t show based on certain conditions, not to mention it probably wouldn’t look very good or feel that great to use, but there are some potentially “simple” fixes doing things that way. For instance, I think it would be fairly straightforward to still display tags that included EVERY frame inside of a minimized tag as normal, so they would live above the collapsed one and extend both directions overhead. One potential solution for tags that only go part-way is to have them stop on/after the minimized tag, inclusive. It wouldn’t be the most obvious/intuitive thing because you wouldn’t know how far that tag extends into ??? number of hidden frames, but it would at least let you know that part of that tag lives inside. One other kind of crappy idea would be to hide ALL other tags except for the currently minimized one, while it’s minimized temporarily, and then restore all the rest upon re-opening the collapsed tag.

Another way to view this would be akin to Excel or Google Sheets, where you can select multiple columns and hide them all away together, and click a little “expand” arrow to open them back up. So, you wouldn’t HAVE to have frames in a tag to hide them, but there would still be the matter of “how to display tags with hidden frames,” I suppose.

The reason for this suggestion is because of my workflow. I like to reference back to my original few frames as a basis for new animations, and having to go back to the first frame, and then either duplicate it and click and drag aaaaalll the way along (potentially dropping it somewhere along the way in the process), or even doing the alt+click and drag (and risking the same drop issue) is quite tedious to me. When tags are minimized it would have the potential to drastically reduce the distance/time to drag new frames, reducing chance for error significantly.

It’s also for organizational and “Clean visuals” purposes. Like I mentioned at the start, I like to have a single .ase for a single character or object that animates. Breaking the individual animations up into their own .ase files feels counterintuitive and messy. Otherwise, what’s the point of the great tag system and being able to export just certain tags and so on? So by minimizing tags I’d be able to “be done” with one temporarily, moving it out of sight, out of mind, out of my way, while I continue to work on new ones.

I realize this suggestion poses a whole giant mess of new technical and design hurdles, but I hope someday in the far, far distant 1.4 (or 1.5… etc.) future, a feature like this might be considered viable.
I’m open to other ideas and discussion for other ways to potentially implement this idea, or alternate solutions to the problems I’m running into. :slight_smile: Thanks for reading!

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i like the mockup nr. 3 as it is clearly shows there are hidden frames in timeline and hence helps to distinguish between collapsed and non-collapsed tags.
i think it would be beneficial to have some automatic options like “collapse / expand all tags” and “auto-expand tag” when user clicks in the collapsed area or on collapsed tag flag.
also, abililty to zoom-out to whole timeline like in video editors would be very helpful as well. the struggle with longer timelines is real and it is not that hard to end up with long timeline even for single animation.

Maybe small button to show drop list of Tags to quickly go to first frame of picked Tag would be more useful? Did you try to Copy/Paste frames instead of dragging them along?

Hi there @Brandon_Graham, requested some time ago in:

and

Tags and slices are two things that we will like to improve after the first v1.3.

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Just did a search on collapse tags to suggest it and found this. It is from 3 years ago.
Any update or more recent post on this? Thanks