Particle Trash Bin

Particle Curation
1

I would like to propose the idea of a streamlined way of removing junk particles: the particle trash bin and an associated trash removal job. For instance, after heterogeneous refinement there are several complete junk particles in junk classes and we proceed with a good class only. At that moment it would be nice to be able to drag junk particle outputs from bad classes to a trash bin and flag them for easy removal to save space.

unselected from 2D? → drag to trash
obvious het refine junk? → drag to trash
trash can getting full? → right click to start file deletion protocol
overly cautious to perform early particle cleaning on highly binned particles but worried if the cleanup is missing good particles due to limited resolution? → extract full pixel size knowing you can delete junk particles easily and almost immediately after identifying them

In my mind it looks and operates like a computer recycle bin somewhere on the GUI. Move files there, able to “undo”, have some calculator of occupied space, quick and immediate to fully delete from file system.

2

It’s a reasonable idea.

Only difficulty I can see with that is how particle extraction is handled. As each micrograph is a single .mrc containing a stack of particles, it’s hard to remove one or two without major I/O overhead.

Extracting as single boxes will make most filesystems struggle with number of files I suspect, and if I remember a few forum posts correctly, on larger datasets people have already reported issues with filesystems complaining about too many file handles, etc…