Is bulk annotation or labelling possible?

I’m trying to see if this would be a valuable tool for us to manage a few thousand images for a classifier model. For a small trial I’ve uploaded 1000 images that are either a particular kind of cellular structure, or not.
My aim was to glance at 50 images or so at a time, select the ones that are “not”, and then label them all as “not”. Then do the same with the ones that “are” the right kind of cell.

I find myself going through the images one at a time though in an annotation task - clicking the label, then save, then next for each image… which seems like a lot of work for such a simple task!

Hi @MartinKlefas

We currently don’t have the ability to mass assign labels to bulk sets of images, but you can use our keyboard shortcuts to speed the process up.

OK, so that’s good, and would speed it up, but they’re not really working as intended…
If I hit “1” I get the first label, which is perfect. Then I hit the right arrow and I’m taken to the end of the label name, to type some more text. So I hit enter, to stop the text from being changed, then I hit right, and I’m editing the text again…

Long story short, some work needs doing on what each keyboard press does vs what it says they do. There’s no way that i can see at present to go to the next image on a keyboard.

quick video of me trying to do it: Annotation - YouTube
Annotation - YouTube

Hi @MartinKlefas

Sorry you’re experiencing issues with that. That isn’t supposed to happen and I’ve replicated the issue and filed a report with the team. Hopefully, that’ll get solved soon.

In the meantime, you can use the numbers on your keypad to select a label, enter to replace it with a label name, and use your mouse to click to the next image. It isn’t ideal but might speed up your process until it’s fixed.

Thanks, the mouse flow is working reasonably well. Look forward to the full keyboard process to be working as intended.

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I can see this still isn’t resolved, but I can seem to skip round the functionality with the tab key. It seems the correct key sequence to label something with the first label is:

  • 1
  • enter
  • tab
  • right

Turns out that cmd+arrow is the way to do it, despite what the docs say (source).

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Thanks, this unfortunately has arrived over a year after I’ve moved to CVAT for most tasks and a self-written platform for really simple bulk labeling like this.

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