Re: Alter status bar or thumbnail view from python plugin

[Felix Riemann <friemann gnome org>]

Am Sonntag, den 23.12.2012, 16:03 +1100 schrieb Tim Cuthbertson:
> Thanks Felix,

Hi Tim,


> On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 2:20 AM, Felix Riemann <friemann gnome org> wrote:
> > Hey Tim,
> >
> > Am Donnerstag, den 20.12.2012, 12:44 +1100 schrieb Tim Cuthbertson:
> >> Is there any way for a (python) plugin to alter the status bar and/or
> >> thumbnail view?
> >
> > Changing the thumbnail view is probably pretty hard, as you'd have to
> > extend both it's data model as well as the used CellRenderer.
> 
> Ok, sounds like that's probably too tricky. I'd settle for a text
> label instead of changing the icon, but I peeked at the relevant code
> and it sounds like I'd still need to alter eog itself (or create a
> duplicate model) to actually implement that - so I'll probably just do
> without this feature.

If you want to add some visualization you could also think about adding
a new page to the sidebar.

> >> I've written a plugin to rate photos, which sets a user-level xattr on
> >> the file to the number of stars a user has given the image. I'd love
> >> to display this as an overlay on the thumbnail bar, or at least in the
> >> status bar. I see other plugins modify the status bar, but they're all
> >> in C and I can't figure out how to do this from python.
> >
> > Regarding the rating see also
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=589198
> 
> Thanks for the pointer, although I don't think it will put me off -
> I've tried every photo "manager" (as opposed to viewer) for linux that
> I've heard of, and almost all of them are completely useless to me
> because they do one (or both) of the following:
> 
>  - store metadata in their own store, which doesn't persist if you
> move / copy / rearrange files (and isn't easy to access externally).
>  - make you import photos into their system manually, rather than just
> using the on-disk arrangement (gthumb is a notable exception here).
> 
> I could write the plugin for gthumb I suppose, although I prefer eog,
> and gthumb has zero documentation on how to write a plugin. I don't
> intend to contort eog too far, it's really just for setting this data
> - I've got a completely-unrelated-to-eog command line tool to actually
> query and do useful things with the metadata.

The Bugzilla link wasn't meant to turn you off, actually it should show
that there is interest in such a plugin. ;)

If you like we can try to include it into the eog-plugins package.
Alternatively we could add a link on our wiki page.

> >> By looking at the .gir it doesn't seem possible, do I need to add GI
> >> annotations to eog itself before I can make use of these functions? Is
> >> there any reason not to do that, or has it just not been done yet?
> >
> > Working with eog's statusbar is easier than it looks.
> > The trick is not to use the EogStatusbar members but use the interfaces
> > of it's parent classes GtkStatusbar and GtkBox to alter it.
> >
> > The included statusbar-date plugin for example simply injects another
> > newly created GtkStatusbar inside eog's statusbar using the GtkBox
> > functions (GtkBox.pack_end).
> >
> > I'm not that much into Python though, so it could be that there might be
> > API limitations here preventing that. Although that's hard to think of
> > as GtkBox is a widely used interface in GNOME.
> 
> You're right, it works just fine. Thanks for the tip to use the
> superclass, I hadn't noticed that. I've now got my extension
> more-or-less working, and the code up on github:
> 
> https://github.com/gfxmonk/eog-rate/blob/master/src/eog_rate/plugin.py
> 
> Feedback welcome, this is my first eog plugin so hopefully I'm doing
> anything too daft.

I'll see if I can take a look at it.
One thing I can see already is that you have a python file that loads
the plugin from a subdirectory. You shouldn't need that file as we can
load the plugin from the subdirectory directly. Just make sure that the
Module key in the .plugin-file has the name of the subdirectory and move
the import statement into the __init__.py file.

Oh, maybe you'd like to use a different icon too? Not sure how
widespread Postr is nowadays. ;)

Regards,

Felix