Learning from your decisions
From your first decision, Vixlo starts learning what you keep, and it keeps that learning with you rather than with the shoot. Read this page when you want to know what the app has learned, how to read the score, or how to make it forget.
What it learns, and from what
Vixlo builds a small ranking from things it has already measured about each frame: frame and subject sharpness, how well the largest face was captured, how many faces there are and whether one is turned away, where the frame sits in its burst, whether it is the second of a look-alike pair, how far from mid-grey it was exposed, how far from noon it was taken, and — once you have named somebody in People — whether they are in it and how big their face is. Nothing is measured for this that was not already being measured.
Under about fifty decisions the fixed table it started from still carries most of the answer; past two hundred, yours carry four fifths. A key that goes against your taste's mark — a correction — counts twice as much as a plain decision, and agreeing — a key the way your taste's mark points, or any Accept — counts half as much, so one correction counts as much as four agreements. A decision with a reason chip on it counts one and a half times on top of that — a correction you explained tells the app more than a key pressed in passing. Each decision is taken in straight away, or within a second when you are deciding quickly, and whatever your taste proposes next is appended to the end of the pass you are walking.
Learn from my decisions, under the rules in the Proposals and criteria pane, switches the whole thing off: nothing is learned and nothing is consulted, and what was already learned stays on disk. The line under it says what the taste is doing — Learned from 214 of your decisions, or By measurement only — learning is switched off.
Yours, not the shoot's
Your decisions are kept as a log in your own folder under ~/Library/Application Support/Vixlo/Learning/, one line per decision, appended and never rewritten — not in the library. So opening a second shoot on this Mac does not start the app over: it already knows what the first one taught it. A library you cull for the first time hands over everything it already knew, once, as it opens.
The one thing each library keeps for itself is a single number saying whether that shoot was culled harder or softer than you usually cull, so a wedding trimmed to forty takes moves that shoot's marks without changing what Vixlo thinks of you. A line of the log is mostly numbers and codes, with the photograph named by a fingerprint of its contents. The exceptions can hold a file path, and What stays on your Mac lists them. Nothing leaves this Mac.
The score, and what it noticed
Vixlo counts how often the mark your taste put on a frame was the decision you then made, over your last 200 such frames: Agrees with your last 200 decisions: 79%, in the Groups pane's proposals block and under the criteria pane's heading. While there are fewer than 200, the line counts the ones there are. It is a count of what was on screen, not a prediction, and only your taste's own marks are in it, bets and leans. A frame it said nothing about is not in it, and neither is a frame that a floor, the burst rule or the look-alike rule marked. A Hold is neither direction and is left out, and a decision made before the app started keeping the log never counts. There is no number at all under twenty such decisions, because a percentage over a handful moves too far with every key. Watching it rise is the proof that the learning is working.
On your taste's row in the criteria pane sit the things it has noticed, counted straight from your decisions across every library and shown only when there is something to count and Learn from my decisions is on: how much of a burst you keep and how often the one you kept was the sharpest; how often you bin the second of a look-alike pair; once People has names, how differently you treat a soft frame with someone you have named in it; and, from twenty counted decisions, the score again, worded as a count: Agrees with your last 200 on 182.
Marks lead the eye. For the truest record of what you keep, turn proposals off (⇧⌘P) for the first hand cull of a library and back on afterwards. Nothing in the app asks you to; it is advice, and a decision made with proposals off counts for more than one made by agreeing with a mark.
Forget my taste
Forget my taste…, at the foot of the Proposals and criteria pane, deletes your log, the ranking fitted from it, and this library's own adjustment. It is the one action in the proposals that deletes something you cannot get back, so it asks first, in a sheet headed Forget my taste? that counts what is about to go — 212 decisions you made, in 3 libraries, the whole log across every library on this Mac and not just this one's — names the folder and its two files, and says that nothing else on disk is touched. A row headed Your decisions themselves stay says why: every Take, Hold and Reject is kept in the library and in the XMP file beside its photograph, never the taste's to delete.
- Cancel, or a click on the dimmed area outside the sheet, leaves everything exactly as it was.
- Forget deletes. There is no undo for it.
Afterwards the taste line reads Working out what you keep… until your next decision, and the row's observations are gone. The fixed table the app started from is not yours to delete, so it still leans; it simply knows nothing about you again. Open a library you have culled and what that library already knows goes back into a fresh log.
Switching Learn from my decisions off is the other way to stop it, and the difference is said once at the pane's foot: Switching it off keeps what was learned · Forget deletes it.