making nautilus exif data aware

[Alan <alan ufies org>]

Greetings folks.

I recently joined the 21st century and got myself a digital camera, and
discovered there's a no support in nautilus for exif data editing or
viewing.

(For those in the dark, exif data is information such as exposure,
shutter speed, time, date, f-stop, and even a thumbnail image, written 
into jpeg images by digital cameras.)

I think that nautilus could have some nice interface additions that
would jive with the world of exif data without becoming overly bloated.
A couple of thoughts quickly before I start doing mock ups or anything,
feel free to throw in other/better/different ideas :)

 - have the information show up in the right click properties dialog,
   probably in the "image" tab (currently the only data displayed is
   image type and resolution)
 - have the info show up as a separate entry on the left hand drop down
   for any file containing exif information.
 - have a separate view that, similar to the audio view, shows the exif
   data as columns in a list view.  Not sure how useful sorting by
   ascending f-stop would be, but maybe showing notes, or date (ie: date
   picture was taken) would be.
 - would there be any advantage to using the exif thumbnails over the
   way that nautilus currently thumbnails?  Probably not, but maybe....
 - maybe have a button on this property->image page that is something
   like "edit" which would either:
    1 open up the gnome approved and packaged exif data editor. Right
	  now there are a few different programs in various states that are
	  exif editors/aware.  gexif, gpc.sf.net, and various other programs 
	  on sf.net, but none that I know of that are "officially
	  sanctioned"
	2 change the dialog to allow editing of the data
	3 open another dialog or very small/simple program that that allows 
   	  editing written specifically for nautilus (ie: not #1)

	Even cooler (IMHO), allow a "next/prev" button that would take you
	to the next/prev image in the directory or the next image that has
	exif data.  For someone such as myself who is looking to use exif to
	catagorize and get information from photo collections, this would
	allow quick and easy adding/editing of comments, etc.  As most of
	the apps that I've played with (ie: nautilus, gthumb) seem to store
	this metadata as a separate file and not taking advantage of the
	abilities of jpg or png to store the data within the image itself,
	it makes it hard to keep it portable, use that data to automatically
	create/populate a html photo album, etc.

Any thoughts?  I don't see any huge downside to this, or doing
*something* to make nautilus exif aware, other than the actual code 
and addition of libexif or libexif-gtk as a gnome dependancy, as if 
done right there wouldn't be a big impact on the UI of nautilus 
overall, and can keep with the "just make it work" philosophy
of gnome 2.  

Maybe it would be better to work with the gthumb guys to make gthumb
more exif aware and friendly would be a better idea, but it would be
nice to be able to get the information in one place.  Right now konq
does a very nice job of displaying all the exif data on the
mouse-hover-preview that they do, but I like nautilus so much better :)

Anyway, enough rambling... thoughts?  Flames?

-- 
Alan <alan ufies org> - http://arcterex.net
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are only 3 real sports: bull-fighting, car racing and mountain 
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