Re: F-spot first impressions



Wow, impressive and fast feedback. As suggested, I'm trying to get to
know the GNOME Bugzilla ;-)

OK, I missed one important point - I'm using a 12" wide screen laptop
(1280x768). In particular, it means I have 16 cm vertical screen
space, which again makes me somewhat picky about not wasting that. :-)
As general GNOME-settings, I've removed the bottom panel and in
F-spot, the toolbar and time line is disabled.

2006/7/4, Stephane Delcroix <stephane delcroix org>:
Hi Morten,

> > Import dialog:
> >
> > - When I create a new tag under "Attach tag:", it doesn't get attached.
> [...]
apparently fixed in CVS
>
> > - With a long list of tags, it gets quite scroll-intensive to get to
> > the "New tag"-option - why not have an extra "Attach new tag: <text
> > box>" below the "Attach tag:"? (With semantics like the semi-secret
> > "t"-shortcut.)
> There is a patch which lets the user resize the tag icons. This makes
> for much less scrolling:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=321025

Still, when I eventually pass 768 tags, they will be one pixel each.
Return of the Scrolling :-)


> > - I have a NTFS/Windows-partition mounted, which makes it show up in
> > the import dialog - it kills f-spot if I select that by accident -
> > could there be a safe-guard against trying to import mounts which does
> > not seem to be flash-cards?
> I'll look for a bug and file one if there is none. How is the
> partition mounted, ro? Can I see your fstab entry?

There's no fstab-entry (GNOME does some black mounting-magic here!),
but my mtab is

/dev/hda1 /media/windows ntfs rw,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0 0

you can file this one to bugzilla

As a enhancement? (Again, I'm new to BZ)

> > Browsing:
> >
> > - When adding comments, the text box stays in focus, seemingly no
> > matter what key pressed. <shift>-<tab> does it, but why not simply
> > <enter> and/or <esc>?
the last-used-widget keeps the focus. what's the expected behavior ?

That is indeed the expected behaviour, from a programming/HIG point of
view. I can't really explain it, but once you have tried just entering
your comment and hit <enter> to finish, it just makes sense to use. (I
believe Picasa does it this way.) Personally it took me a few weeks to
discover that <shift>-<tab> did the trick - otherwise I used the
mouse.


> > - When looking at individual pictures, <space> goes *backwards* in
> > time and <backspace> goes forward. That seems very awkward for me, and
> > backwards of every other photo program I remember using.
> We're on our way towards the Big Crunch! That's entrophy for you. We
> remember the future but not the past because the thermodynamic arrow
> of time is facing 180 degrees from the psychological arrow of time. It
> was bound to happen sooner or later.

Not being a physicist, the "arrow of time"-business does not make
sense to me. :-)


;););)
well, look at the timeline in the top. the browsing way is consistant
with the timeline. Typing PgDwn, DownArrow, RightArrow, Space go one
step to the right. (of the timeline).
You can display the timeline (and your collection) in chronological
order, bye checking View>Reverse Order

As explained earlier, I've disabled the time line. It is pretty nice,
but it also takes up quite a lot of space.

I tried using the View->Reverse Order for a while, but as the main
view defaults to showing the pictures at the top of the list, I had to
scroll to the end of the list every time I opened F-spot (that was
also somewhat annoying).


> > - When looking at pictures in full screen, the <left> and <right>-keys
> > does not work until either <space> or <backspace> has been used.
> Again, if this can be confirmed then I'll file a bug.
In FullScreen or in View Mode ?
In fullscreen, there's no problem (with the latest CVS), in Viewmode,
there's indeed the small problem of giving the focus to the main pane...

>
> > - When in the overview-mode, why is the bottom-most pane consists of a
> > "add photos"-button, a "F-spot"-label (identical to window title, by
> > the way) and a zoom-control. I understand the zoom-control, and the
> > add-button, but why not use the remaining space to show some useful
> > information ("Currently browsing 973 photos of total 10534 in
> > collection")?
> That would be nice. I agree that there is a lot of wasted space in the
> interface.
File a bug, include a mock-up

I'll look into it. (Is there any good way to make a mock-up, besides
screen-dump -> gimp -> BZ?) And is i possible to attach files in BZ?


> > - The tags-browser is great, but it could be better. - A lot of space
> > is wasted on showing a big thumbnail/icon and a little bit of text.
> > Why not do like Rhythmbox' "Queued songs", showing a the title (which
> > would be the tag name) in large font, and showing album and band name
> > (eg. number of photos with the tag) with a smaller font. Personally, I
> > think it would be really nice if the timestamp of the earliest and
> > latest photo with the tag could be shown in a sensible way.
> See above regarding patch.

It's one thing to make the thumbs smaller, which I will be needing
before too long. But it could also be nice to have more information
about the tag available at hand.

> > - All photo dates is seemingly shown in GMT, not local time.
> Have you recently had windows on your computer? You may have set the
> system clock to UTC by accident.
There's a lot of bug filled regarding Time... if you don't find an
answer, fill a bug (again) and it'll be a good starting point to help
you

From browsing BZ, it seems quite a few bugs has already been filed.


> > Photo manipulation:
> >
> > - Where is the undo-button? Currently it seems the photo has to be
> > removed from the collection, delete the extra files created and
> > re-import the picture...
> No, you see the dropdown box where it say "modified"? Change that to
> "Original": there's your pic. It's actually much better than redo, as
> you can keep both the original and the modified photo.

Probably so, but what if I don't want to waste space having an old
image lying around? My camera spits out 2.5 MB/shot, so it is in
reality quite an on-disk redo cache to keep around ;-)


> > - I really fancy Picasas cropping and rotating - when selecting a area
> > with the crop-tool, the to-be cropped part is grayed out, giving a
> > stronger visual clue about what the result is going to look like. And
> > Picasa has s crop-preview... The rotation-tool is able to do
> > increments less than 90-degrees, which makes it usable. (Perhaps a
> > "straighten"-option where you add two points along a vertical or
> > horizontal line in the photo, and then rotate it accordingly?)
> File a wish. Sounds good.
>
> > - When color-correcting, it takes an instant too long to make the
> > changes show, which makes it somewhat irritating to use. And why can't
> > the values be re-adjusted later?
> >
> >
> > Export to folder:
> >
> > - When "rescale pictures" is selected, the exported pictures are
> > rotated correctly. If it's not, the pictures are not rotated. Took
> > some time to figure out ;-)
there's a bug AND a patch for this
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165645
> > - When "rescale pictures" are selected, small pictures get up-scaled,
> > which (at least to me) seems counter-intuitive. I use it to enforce a
> > maximum size of my pictures, not the other way around :-)
fill a bug, asking changing the 'size' box by a 'max size'
> > - When exporting to a folder, the progress-bar immediately hit 100%
> > and stay there until the export is finished.
> > - The exported pictures are way smaller than the originals, measured
> > in file size (~2.1 MB -> ~1.3 MB). As I doubt Canons DSLRs are *that*
> > bad at JPEG-compression, what data is discarded? (And where do I set
> > the JPEG compression factor?)
> This seems important. Can anybody confirm?
confirmed, a bug is already filled and the solution is half done:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318376
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346452

While I haven't looked at the bugs, it seems you're on top of this. Great!

> > - The export-sub menu has a "Export to Web Gallery"-option (which I
> > *guess* refers to Gallary2), but there's also an almost identically
> > labelled option in the "Export to Folder"-dialog. Potentially very
> > confusing.
> There is definete need for documentation on this.
The whole export menus and dialog needs clean-up and love. It'll
probably be much easy once the 'plugin' patch is accepted

From browsing the f-spot-list archives, I understand some kind of
plugin-architecture is under way, but I failed to find out if it was
just export plugins or for the entire application...

--
Siebuhr



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