Smart Groups -- let's revisit this, shall we?

FotoMagico Feature Requests
1

Back in 2016 a mysterious menu item appeared called “Smart Groups” under the Slideshow > Layer menu item. It was never really explained, and Oliver mentioned that it hadn’t been incorporated into the user guide. I might be wrong – but it still hasn’t!! And that’s been 10 years ago (sigh). I had kinda figured out how to use it, sorta, but apparently it only works with snippets.

So, what the heck is this menu item for? And how is it incorporated?

And, more importantly – I would really like to see a “Group” menu item that allows you to group together two, three, or as many layers as you want, on a single slide. You CAN select multiple layers by swiping over them in the Timeline, but that really doesn’t allow them to be treated as a “group.” And, you can’t select more than one layer at a time on the stage, either. So once you spend a lot of time trying to space things out and putting images in their place independently, there’s no way to move them all at once without losing their respective positions to each other.

2

Thanks for explaining how you want to use groups in FotoMagico. That makes a lot of sense.

The Smart Groups feature is indeed designed to link images across different slides. This means that when you drag an image onto one slide within a Smart Group to replace its content, all other slides that are part of the same group will automatically update with the new content as well. Similarly, any effects applied to one slide in the group will reflect across all slides in that group. This functionality allows for creating complex snippets efficiently. If an image is shown over multiple consecutive slides, Smart Groups ensure the user don’t have to repeatedly fill in the same image, saving time and effort.

3

Thanks for the explanation, Achim.

Obviously I’d still like to see a feature where multiple layers can be grouped on a slide and moved as a unit. Even being able to copy the entire group as a unit to another slide would be great as well. I know it can get complicated with different options, but it would make authoring a lot easier.