Adding an annotations requires too many clicks

[davide-bontempelli-zupit]

With competitors, e.g. lablestudio, roboflow, etc. if I want to annotate for example with a bounding box I can select the class directly from the annotation screen, using the keyboard, making the annotation process smooth and fast.

With tator, since you have to confirm after each annotation, you have to do 3 more clicks (open dropdown, select class, save), making the annotation process 3-4 times slower.
Scaling the problem to thousands of annotations, the impact is considerable.

I am aware of the ‘Draw continuously’ option but it is not the same since I may have to change classes frequently.

Example of what i mean with label studio

Screen.sharing.-.2025-01-24.9_58_00.AM.mp4

[BGWoodward]

Hi Davide,

We are definitely sympathetic to extra clicks. A reason why we don't have the features you mentioned is because we don't enforce a specific schema for observations. Many users of Tator have extremely detailed and extremely specific fields they want for different types of annotations, and this capability is in conflict with a simple label schema.

One thing that I recommend is to look at the favorites functionality. This can streamline the amount of clicks that you need.

We are always looking to optimize workflows,and preconfigured favorites with keyboard shortcuts is something that is on our list to explore as a functionality.

[bctcvai]

I could see something like this being experimented with, if a project had a well defined schema and the goal was bulk vs detailed/deep annotation. I can definitely see why having a dock for favorites would be preferable to modals in bulk cases. Thanks for sharing!

Beyond Ben's suggestion, there are ways to add project specific UI extensions, which could be used to experiment with bulk annotation capabilities. However, off the top of my head I don't recall how deep the literature is on the OSS side for the feature.

[jrtcppv]

This is what I would propose for including this in Tator core, but we can start with an applet:

• Create a new toolbar button for a favorites dock
• Allow favorites to be defined at project scope
• Dock should include options to filter based on user specific vs project-scoped favorites, possibly shape and/or data type as well
• Dock should include user assignable hotkeys
• New view in project settings for managing favorites