Re: [PATCH] EOG Collection

[Jens Finke <jens triq net>]

[ I think this discussion is better located at eog-list gnome org  
Please reduce the CC to this list only on further replies. Thanks. ]

Hi Bryan,

Bryan W Clark wrote:
> I did a little hacking of the EOG Collection View today to hopefully
> improve it a little bit.

thanks for your interest and your work on eog.

> I changed the default behavior to be a horizontal scroll instead of
> vertical. 

Personally, I often want a quick overview over all the photos I shot at 
a day. So I won't change the scroll policy to horizontal scrolling in 
general. Admittedly, if you display only a single row of images the 
horizontal scrolling makes more sense. IMO the right solution would be 
to switch to horizontal scrolling automatically if the size of the 
thumbnail viewer is reduced to a single row.

> Also I changed the visibility method for the scrolling of the canvas, it
> now makes sure that the next thumbnail plus a little bit more are
> visible upon switching selected thumbnails.  I'm hoping this provides
> people with better feedback on what image is next as they are switching
> thumbnails in the list.

The idea is good. For a general solution (horizontal / vertical 
scrolling) the patch must be improved of course (though I haven't looked 
at the patch in detail yet).

> I whipped up a little web page explaining what I did with some
> screenshots so you can get a better idea.
> http://clarkson.edu/~clarkbw/eog/

The layout algorithm has been reworked in the current CVS HEAD version 
(also included in the 2.5.0 tarball). So the large vertical space in 
your shots should vanish now.

> Also another change that I made was the save on rotate.  I hooked the
> save image callback into the rotate functions so that it will
> automatically save on rotation of an image. [...]

This has some drawbacks:

- With each saving of a jpeg the quality is reduced (lossy format). This 
can be avoided if libjpeg is used for lossless transformation of local 
jpeg files (which is planned).

- A nice thing in EoG is that you can rotate a large bunch of images in 
one run, while only the thumbnail representations are rotated. This is 
extremly fast and you get a quick overview if your transformation was 
right (eg. I always get horizontal/vertical flipping wrong). If an image is

- You can undo transformations, without touching the files again.

- IMO people don't expect that the change will overwrite the original 
file immediately (usability issue: may lead to data loss)

- Eog can save only 'png' and 'jpeg' files. If you rotate eg. a gif file 
the automatic save will fail.

My idea for a better usability on this for 2.6 is:

- Visually indicate that an image was modified
- Select all modified images with one menu function
- Ask the user on close if he want's to save the modifications if there 
are any.

> Last (and this didn't work out...) I tried to put in a toolbar item for
> the full screen slide-show mode, but the standard "fullscreen" icon
> didn't show up.  I know I just have the name wrong, but I couldn't find
> the right one to use.

Again a good idea. Though, I don't know of any default fullscreen icon 
(means one included in gtk/gnome). I think we must provide our own.

On a general note: Please make patches against the CVS HEAD version of 
eog, it changed quite a lot recently. It will build also against a Gnome 
2.4 environment (yet :). Also it's a good idea to split different 
changes into different patches, to better see which change belongs to 
which functionality.


Regards,

   Jens