Project vs Session

An Insight project contains everything that has ever been imported or created in the project, and which has not been subsequently deleted. A session contains a subset of the data that you want to work with right now (i.e. what is displayed in the Insight control panel), along with display settings like colourbar and clips, line colours, window positions, zoom levels, etc.

These were somewhat blurry concepts in previous versions of Insight, because many things that you might think of as being in the project were actually stored in the session. This is no longer the case.

Import vs Open

Import and Open were also somewhat nebulous concepts that are now much more clearly defined:

  • Import loads an external file into the database (and adds it to your current session)
  • Open loads an existing session.

By contrast, each tab in the control panel now has a Search for (things) in Project action, which allows you to open items that are already in the project database, adding them to your current session.

Delete vs Remove

The Delete and Remove actions have also been properly distinguished as follows:

  • Delete from Project removes the item from the database permanently, affecting all users and sessions.
  • Remove from session simply drops the item from your current session, but leaves it in the database for other users and sessions. You can re-insert it at any time via the Search dialog.

Saving

Almost everything you do is visible only to you until you save your session. This means that you can continue to experiment, even on shared data, with the safety net of simply not saving your session (see also Autosave in Insight).