I’ve been using Coda for years to manage our animation studio’s assets and absolutely love it!
Quick question that’s been bugging our team: When we add a new image to a cell that already contains images, it gets added to the bottom of the stack. This means the thumbnail shown in the column view is always the oldest image, not the newest one.
Every time we update an asset, we have to click into the cell and manually drag the new image to the front so it displays in our table. With dozens of assets being updated daily, this adds up!
Is there any way to:
Have new images automatically appear at the top of the stack?
Or reverse the display order so the most recent image shows as the thumbnail?
It’s a small thing, but it would make a big difference for our workflow. Thanks in advance!
i gather the “cell“ you mentioned is of the “Files“ type column ?
if so, unfortunately this is currently not possible in coda.
if you’re open to a good ol’ workaround to your workflow…
Set Up: You could add another table for the files and create a relation to your main table.
Then in your main table create a column “Latest“ and it displays last uploaded file.
Workflow: So each time a member of your team needs to upload a file, just go to the Files table and add it to a new row. Then select what project it belongs to in the relation column.
PROs
no mental burden of going to potentially massive main table and looking for the row.
increased data preservation as no accidental deletes of all files in 1 cell. worst case, just need to relink rather than upload all files again.
“Latest“ column will auto display most recent file and potentially avoids an extra click on file to view (depends on file format) i.e. quick view
CONS
More rows in doc. Doc size limits. if this is the case, could also consider google drive pack, dropbox pack etc
Thank you so much, Melanie, for the detailed explanation! Unfortunately, the workaround won’t quite work for our use case.
We’re using an actual Image column rather than a text-based approach. Part of what makes our tracker valuable is seeing the visual evolution of each design. Artists drag updated artwork directly into the cell as assets progress through revisions.
The issue is that each new image gets added to the bottom of the stack, so the thumbnail always shows the oldest version rather than the latest. We end up needing to click into the cell/row and manually dragging the newest image to the front just to see current progress at a glance.
Would love if there were a way to reverse this default behavior! But I appreciate your help — and I may actually borrow your workaround for a different doc if you don’t mind.
sorry i dont think i quite understand what you mean by “text-based approach“ ??
did you check out the demo doc?
ive added an image column as in the files/assests table so it should work.
also have added a “Progress” column which then shows images all from end to start order.
oh.. i think ive just realized.. do you mean table based approached? like sorting out the rows?
For this, you can create a column of last modified (for just the image column) in the files/assets table and then put on the sort setting for the last modified field to “descending“
the caveat is when the image column was touched/edited last in table. unfortunately, there is no way of getting meta data of image created/last modified unless manually input this info into a date/time column.
(reference Extracting metadata from file . credit to the OG @Paul_Danyliuk)
Thank you Melanie. I just want last image added to Image column (there are a few images in each ‘cell’ , see the little number bottom right ?) to appear at ‘top’.
can either be in type of image column (where youll get 1 image displayed with number count in corner) or if you want to look at all at a glance i.e. have all images, then have a text type column.
Unfortunately, I believe there is no way to make Coda reverse the order of uploaded images so that the most recent one is the 1st in the list immediately.
What you could do is add a new column called “Reverse Evolution” of type image, and add the below formula to that new column:
[Visual Evolution].ReverseList()
So the Visual Evolution would be the place artists upload their art, and the “Reverse Evolution” column would be where you can check the reversed progression without manually having to reorder things. Also, the latest art will be displayed as the thumbnail.
These names are just a suggestion, so you could change the names of the column to better match their purpose such as renaming “Visual Evolution” to something like “Upload Art” and the actual reverse list column could be the new “Visual Evolution”.
there is not native coda setting to help you out. An automation would be an option (sorting from latest to oldest), but there is always a delay between adding the file and waiting for the automation to update the row. A direct alterative is to use thisRow.[the files].ReverseList()
You could have one table or a form (which is also a view of table) for adding the images (as files) and then the table view showing the latest added first via the reverselist() logic.
This is as good as it gets I am afraid, Cheers, Christiaan
