Exporting to Gallery and other apps

[Rob Lanphier <robla robla net>]

Hi all,

I've been happily running F-Spot with Gallery for a long time now
(thanks!).  However, a patch was recently applied
(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543863 ) that changes things
so that the F-Spot comment now gets used in the "Description" field,
rather than the "comment" field (using the filename of the photo for the
"Title" field now). You can see the difference in behavior here:
http://photos.robla.net/gallery/v/2009/hidden/fspot543863

It looks like the person who submitted the patch seems pretty determined
that the new behavior is the correct one.  I'm just as sure that the old
behavior is better.  I've filed a corresponding issue for reverting the
patch:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=577130

The obvious compromise is to add an option in the dialog.  I can
envision making this a single multi-selection dropdown:

"Map F-Spot comment to the following Gallery field: "  Choices:
1.  Title
2.  Summary
3.  Description

If #2 or #3 is picked, the F-Spot filename becomes the Title.  If #1 is
picked, the F-Spot comment becomes the title.  This doesn't seem like a
perfect heuristic or an exhaustive mapping (there are 2 pieces of F-Spot
data to map to 3 fields in Gallery) , but it's pretty easy to pick
reasonable behavior for the filename given what the mapping of the
F-Spot comment is.

I can understand a strong desire not to add more knobs and buttons
without analyzing both what the correct default is as well as figuring
out whether deviation from the default is something that more than 1% of
users will likely want to do.  I'm pretty sure that most people are
using F-Spot similarly to the way I use it (import photos straight off
of camera, add comments, upload some of the photos somewhere like
Facebook or Gallery)  Given that F-Spot doesn't seem to provide a
mechanism to edit filenames, it seems silly to highlight the filename as
the title in Gallery.

However, I'd settle for writing a patch to make this into a preference
if I knew:
1.  There was a good chance a well-written patch implementing the
dropdown described above would be accepted into the tree.
2.  That the development team believes that the new behavior (filename
as title) is the correct default.

If #1 isn't true, then I'm better off just reverting the patch for as
long as I continue to use F-Spot+Gallery.  If #2 isn't true, then I'd
prefer reverting to the old behavior, and putting the onus on someone
else to develop the pref.

Thanks
Rob