Re: criticism and suggestions

[Larry Ewing <lewing novell com>]

On Sun, 2006-03-19 at 18:09 +0100, Hans-Peter Doerr wrote:
> hi,
> 
> i'm watching f-spot development for some time now and while i think it's
> getting along quite well, there are mainly three things which are
> preventing me from actually using f-spot as my every-day photo
> application. these are just my personal opinions, but i believe there
> are other people having similar concerns.
> 

Thanks for the input.  When you are discussing issues on the please
always be explicit about which version you are using CVS .10 .11 etc.
It almost always makes a difference in how I will respond.

> 1) slideshow.
> f-spot currently has two (!) options in its preferences dialog. one of
> them is for the obviously very important feature of using f-spot as a
> screensaver, while it's not even possible to set a delay for the
> slideshow modus. pausing slideshows or manually switching to the
> previous/next image would be very nice also.
> 

Slide show options just aren't a high priority of mine.  They aren't
hard, probably less than 100 lines of code, but they aren't very
interesting either so something else always comes up before they do.  If
it is a priority of yours feel to comment on the appropriate bugs [1] or
bring it up here.  If someone wants to add a time between slide
function, I'd probably be happiest with something a slider that let you
pick between 1 and 30 sec on a exponential scale.

> 2) general image view and fullscreen mode
> the image brwoser is quite fast in general, but unneccessary slow in
> actually displaying pictures. this  is annoying especially in the
> fullscreen mode. each picture is updated three times: first, a up-scaled
> version of the thumbnail is shown, then the up-scaled thumbnail is
> smoothed, just before beeing replaced by the scaled full-res picture.
> why there might be reasons to to it this way in the thumbnail view, it
> is just unneccessary in full screen mode. why not scaling pictures
> off-screen and show them in one go as the slideshow mode already does?
> 

How slow is this for you? It is very fast for me [2].  I use it all the
time as I page quickly though images.  That said, loading a large jpeg
is not particularly fast, f-spot trades off being very responsive for
taking a little bit longer and that same code also allows you to see a
raw file in a reduced resolution form long before it can be rendered.
As to why it doesn't do the same thing as the slideshow, that view is a
full featured view, more abilities will be showing up there, don't think
of it as a glorified slideshow.  

If the current loading code is really too annoying to stand for you, I'd
be happy to look at a patch that added precaching to those images.
Something that stored the next and previous images and only fell back to
the progressive loading would be a good way to handle the perception
issue (at the cost what could be a lot of memory).

> 3) sort by date
> this is a suggestion for the "show in chronological order" against
> "newest first" topic. i would suggest a "grouping" machanism which
> allows to specify which pictures belong to one event (eg. "summer
> hollidays"). pictures in the same group are sorted chronological (oldest
> first) but the group with the newest image is shown on top.
> each picture belongs to exactly one or zero group. this could be done by
> selecting the wanted pictures and a "group pictures" item in the context
> menu. a "remove selected pictures from group" should also be available.
> these groups don't need to get names, one only needs to know that a
> picture belongs to a group or don't.
> 

You can set the sort order now.

> if these groups also would be distinguishable visually (eg. by a
> slightly different brackground color, as in gtk's list-views for
> example) browsing lots of pictures would even become more intuitive.
> well, thats actually what tags are for, but as one tag may contain
> pictures from different "events" something like this maybe would be
> worth thinking of.
> 

Better grouping in the icon view is in the list of things I'd like to
see.  If interested people want to mock up some designs visually we
could start to move forward on that.  In the past a couple of people
have written various patches to add gouping that had rather severe
performance implications in the IconView.  As a rule of thumb anything
that does grouping needs to be extremely careful about not causing
problems for the display speed. I'd be happy to go over the details of
how I think one could accomplish that sometime if anyone is interested.

--Larry

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318931
    http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325165

[2] There seem to be some X drivers that are extremely slow at redrawing
the whole screen, if you are running into this it is entirely possible
the redraw is painful.