Re: [PATCH] EOG Collection

[Bryan W Clark <clarkbw clarkson edu>]

Hi Jens ~

This wasn't supposed to be as long as it turned out...

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 07:42, Jens Finke wrote:
> [ 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. 

I was thinking that the icon view would best used to have a quick
overview of all the images in a directory.  

What is your screen resolution?   I saw the collection view on someones
screen that is >> 1024x768 and you could expand the thumbnail area to
provide a good amount of space to move around and see where you're
going.  On my laptop I have a 1024x768 resolution which I think only
provides enough room for one row of thumbnails with the preview image at
a reasonable size.  With only one row of thumbnails you can never tell
where the next image is coming from or what it looks like.

> 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.

IMHO the idea of the collection viewer is to provide a filmstrip /
slideshow for the user.  I think that in order to design for the
filmstrip model we can't providing a quick overview of all images at the
same time; the two design paradigms are mutually exclusive in our
current view.

> > 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).

Yeah, it was a little bit of a hack, but I was looking for ideas and
feedback first before I tried to clean up all the extra space and do it
right.

> > 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.

Thanks, that's great!

> > 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).

Ok, I wasn't aware of that.  I'm sure you're almost all the way through
it, you've been making great progress so far.  Once libjpeg is
incorporated I think an auto-save would _then_ be a good feature to
add.  Hopefully we can work together on a good way to implement it.

> - 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.

I think this is a cool feature, but I wasn't aware of it until I dove
into the code.  I think were we to take a poll of desktop-devel and ask
"how many people know that the EOG collection has this feature" we'd get
very few responses.  The feature is great once you know how to use it,
but I can't see a good way to convey that to users.  So I think it needs
to remain in the project functionality, (because advanced users and
shutterbugs can get good use out of this)  but for this feature the
usage group of people probably represent a significantly small percent
of the population of all our users.

>From a usability standpoint I would argue that the beginner to
intermediate user would have an experience like this:

Download new photos off their digital camera into directory "my trip"
Open up nautilus and navigate to "my trip" directory
Now switch to collection view so that they can show off the pictures
from their trip to everyone else, narrating each shot as it is in the
preview window.  If they come across an image that is shot at a
different rotation than the others they would like to rotate it during
their "mini-slideshow" and not have to rotate it again when they leave
the directory and open it up again to show their pictures to someone
else.


To throw out an idea to solve the "rotated it the wrong way" situation,
we could try to implement a high feedback rotation system, similar to
what the new GIMP does does for image rotation.  We could have a button
change the rotation to a "mode" and the cursor to a hand icon, then
allow people to flip/rotate all they want.  When they exit this "mode"
we save the image for them.   Just a thought :)

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

I agree this is a problem, I'm on the GUP team and am working out a spec
to try to solve this right now.  The basic idea is that when you
transfer in images from a USB or similar device, GNOME does the transfer
automatically (like OS X does) and drops copies of all the images in
"$HOME/.gnome2/negatives" The negatives directory has a backup copy of
all images you've put on your system using GNOME.  Your "my trip"
directory starts out as a copy of the new images downloaded into the
"negatives" directory; you can then always restore images from the
original to any directory.

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

I think this is a problem with the EOG save in general and not so much
with the auto-save idea, I'm sure we can fix this one as well with a
little hacking. 

> 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.

Take a look at the "rotate mode" idea or maybe you can elaborate a
little more on how this will work visually, as I can't see it.

The problems I'm envisioning with this is either:

Some of the modified images are scrolled off screen in different
locations and in the 'select all modified' the user only sees the ones
that are visible, but didn't want to change the ones that are at the
bottom of the canvas space.

-- OR --

On close EOG asks the users "You've changed 'pict1454.jpg', do you want
to save?"  And then again for every image other image that was rotated. 
I couldn't identify any of the names my camera gives my images and I
don't rename them since I have too many to do that.  I _can_ remember
which one I want to rotate when I'm looking at it and see that it's
wrong.

> > 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.

Hmm... I thought I found a default fullscreen, but maybe it's not
included with standard gtk/gnome.   This could just be my distro, but in
my $PREFIX/share/icons/gnome/24x24/stock/ there is a
"stock_fullscreen.png"  Of course it looks a little small for our needs,
so maybe it's no good. :(

> 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.

Oh, this is definitely my bad; I should have used CVS HEAD.  But I saw
that you ripped out the code for Horizontal display about two weeks ago,
so I had to use older versions of the the collection files to try my
stuff out.  

I'll split up the different patch ideas from now on, this is me not
using good etiquette; I think I was just raised wrong :-)

Thanks for your reply,
~ Bryan

-- 
Bryan W Clark
Graduate Student
Math && Computer Science Dept.
Human Computer Interaction Group
Clarkson University
Potsdam, NY USA
 
http://www.clarkson.edu/~clarkbw/