Chorus

A WIP DAM

I worked on Chorus from 2012 until 2022, though the real development didn't get going until 2014.

We shipped 35 releases and 4 major versions.

It's a large chunk of my working life, of which I'm very proud—Chorus is a great product, used by many of the world's top creative teams.

Rather than give you a deep dive into all its features, I thought I would go over some of the nice little bits of polish I added, and why I'm still pleased I did.

Uploads

Drag & Drop

I guess it seems old-hat now, but Chorus was right at the forefront of drag & drop uploads. Eight years on, we still do it better than most.

We really went all-out to try to get our web app to feel like a desktop app.

You can drop hundreds of images and folders at once. Then navigate around and keep working as they upload, so anyone viewing the same folder from another browser will see the progress. We even use chunked uploads, so we can resume if anything goes wrong.

Avatars

Drag & Drop

It's a little thing, I know, but it always annoys me when you have to find some special UI to upload an avatar, so I made all avatars drop-on-able.

That little popup has a pin on it, so you can keep it open and find an image in your site. The Images in Chorus are all drag-&-droppable.

Users

Drag & Drop, Multi-select

To add a user to a space, you pick up their avatar and drop it into a role. More than that, you can pick as many avatars as you want and add them all together — we added multi-select to every list.

Chorus had many little features that people used without realising it—working cursor keys, shift-select and command-select to select multiple things at once.

Folders

Drag & Drop, Double-click

In a time when most DAMs had static, stripy, lists of files, I wanted something properly visual like the Finder on a Mac, but with giant image thumbnails. Making it work like a Mac was a no-brainer — why teach everyone some other way of doing things when you could simply drag things in and out of folders and double-click to open them?

We did have stripy lists of files, too. But they also worked just like a Mac.

Zoom and Pan

Scrollwheel, Keyboard Shortcuts

I really wanted smooth zoom & pan, and standard keyboard shortcuts, in Chorus. Whenever a UI was managing files we made it work like a Mac, whenever we were previewing files, we made it behave like AdobeCC, in particular Bridge and Photoshop. That way, if a creative user uses their muscle-memory, the right thing will happen before they realised what they've done.

Another interesting choice I made was to make pan and zoom carry over from one image to the next. This meant that you could zoom into a detail in one image, and then use the cursor keys to flick back and forward between similar images in a photoshoot. Great for checking small details.

Cropping

WYSIWYG

When we created this cropper, croppers were dashed regions you drew on an image. I always hated those, they were fiddly and inaccurate. I wanted something properly WYSIWYG. Again, the world agreed and now this kind of cropper is standard. Ours is still one of the best, I think.

It was a surprisingly controversial decision (at the time), but when we came to add overlays to the cropper, it was clear that it had been the right way to go.

Sharing

Drag & Drop, Stacks

Wherever possible, I wanted Chorus to visually describe what is going on rather than list it. Desktop stacks were an idea that had been floating about the HCI/UI world for a long time. CSS could now do rotations and shadows, so I went all-in on them.

Under the hood, our file-sharing system and our 'spaces' system were conceptually the same thing. So, it was natural to use similar drag & drop UIs for them. This UI made it straightforward to share files with multiple users, each with different permissions.

View Options

Customisation

Square Polaroid-style images look great in screenshots. But for photographers, it's important to be able to see photos in landscape and portrait. I'd been playing around with ways to zoom large numbers of images in real-time and, after multiple tries, we made it work reliably in all browsers. It may have been a mistake to hide such a cool little feature away in a menu like this, but I didn't want those kinds of controls cluttering up the main interface.

Metadata Editing

Unsaved Changes

In a UI with an editor and previous/next buttons, it's vital to be able to see when you have unsaved changes. This UI makes it very hard to miss them, without them becoming too dominant.

We tried whatever we could to make it less painful to edit large numbers of images in one session. This UI is completely usable without the mouse. It also has several keyboard shortcuts, including ones for save-and-next.

PDF Viewer

Multiple page sizes

I didn't like the way most PDF viewers worked. I wanted something simple that made it easy to scroll and zoom far in, as many of our users would be checking fine details rather than reading long documents. Plus, I wanted smooth mouse-scrolling, drag-to-pan, and a key modifier for zoom-on-scroll.

Other DAMs had difficulty showing multipage PDFs, let alone multipage PDFs where every page could be a different shape or size. But this is important to creative work, so I made the team do it (sorry, James).

Scalable UI

Accessibility, SVG

Being that I laid out the first CSS for Chorus, I made sure that the view zoom keys worked to change the size of the UI. I only used SVGs for the UI (again, very unusual at the time) so we could zoom right in without the UI breaking. This was great for people with long-sightedness, people with small laptops, and people like me who had to check all the SVG artwork. It’s only a coincidence that I have all three.

Search

Sometimes Speed is UX

It became apparent that many of our customers used folder-names to organise their files, rather than metadata. Chorus's metadata was best-in-class, but it was unreasonable to expect large media organisations to tag their giant libraries when we could simply search their folder-names.

Getting this to work was straightforward. Getting this to work fast wasn't. Chris persevered and, after many stabs at it, we had real-time drop-downs on sites with thousands of folders. Which delighted ITV.