Re: importing directories

[Larry Ewing <lewing novell com>]

On Wed, 2005-11-30 at 13:31 -0500, John Russell wrote:
> On 11/30/05, Larry Ewing <lewing novell com> wrote:
> >
> > It is a potential data loss situation, I'm not sure saving the setting
> > is appropriate.  It certainlt needs to be explicit and not implcit that
> > the setting is lasting.  Is it really that hard to uncheck the box?  Or
> > is it just a pain when combined with the automatic path chosing stuff
> > below?
> 
> I don't see how this is potential data loss.  Maybe if you were having
> f-spot always manager your pics and were importing directly from a
> camera.  However, I've been around the block with umpteen different
> photo organizer thingies so I organize my own pics with directories.
> For this sort of usage, yes, this is really annoying especially since
> you can't change the fact that it keeps putting the photos in
> ~/Photos.
> 

Say you start up f-spot for the first time and have a bunch of pictures
that you want to leave in place because you are just testing it.  A
couple of days later you plug a card reader in, gvm starts the import
process you import all your photos from the card.  You look at them for
a while then unplug the card reader and close f-spot.  The next day you
put the card back in the camera see it still has the pictures delete
them and take a few more.  You go back to f-spot import the new photos
then decide you want to look at the photos from yesterday and double
click one.  You get an giant ? and then freak out when you realize you
lost all your photos from the previous day.

Originally f-spot always copied if the card was on removable media and
always left it in place otherwise.  More than one person lost photos
because they thought that importing did in fact copy and removed the
originals.  Always copying from removable media also prevents a person
from using a laptop with an external usb drive to hold photos, which is
not uncommon.

I added the option the way it is now to avoid those problems.  I don't
consider them solved, that will take more work, but it is now harder to
lose your images and that is worth the pain of some people needing to
click a box to me.

> Also, I was pretty surprised when the settings _weren't_ preserved. 
> That is pretty standard practice for any checkbox like setting on most
> applications.  I think that if it is on by default (which it is) and
> the setting is saved when you change it, then people who dont' know
> any better are happy, people that like the copy can just leave it, and
> I can turn it off ;-)

I'm happy to work on other solutions, there are a lot of possible fixes
including something like what David mentions later in this thread, but
simply keeping the setting between calls is not something I'm willing to
do.

> >
> > > > I imported a directory with some movies in it as my camera takes avi
> > > > movies. The non-image files ( avi and one .wav ) show up as empty
> > > > entries in the catalog.
> > >
> > > I'm not sure how these are supposed to be handled.  I know that support
> > > for opening avi's in totem and keeping track of wav's associated with
> > > photos are feature requests, but I thought they were supposed to be
> > > silently skipped for now too.
> > >
> >
> > They should be being skipped right now, if they aren't something strange
> > is going on.  Skipping them This is actually a bug, it needs to at least
> > copy them when importing from DCIM directories so that people don't lose
> > the movies.
> 
> I agree about the copying movies and sound bites.  I'll try to find
> out why they show up blank for me.
> 

Thanks.

> > The underscore thing is an annoying side effect of the way gtk mnemonics
> > are implemented and how gtk# wraps those interfaces.  There is code in a
> > couple of places to escape the _ but everything that displays paths
> > needs to be audited.
> 
> Can you point me to one that escapes correctly so I know what to fix
> if I see it again?
> 

It is just a matter of calling .Replace ("_", "__") when you pass the
string to gtk.

--Larry