A couple Frogr suggestions

[Quinn Dombrowski <quinn quinndombrowski com>]

(To the rest of the Frogr list, at Mario's suggestion I'm forwarding
and continuing an exchange I was having with him directly about a
couple new features.)

One thought about suggestion #3 (rotating to the right orientation)--
I think it's going to depend on the camera used to take the picture.
My older camera didn't store any metadata about landscape/portrait
orientation, and in those cases I guess people would just be out of
luck. My current camera, though, stores metadata that certain pieces
of software are automatically able to recognize, and display the
picture correctly. (Eye of GNOME can do it, for instance.) You can see
it in the EXIF data viewer on Flickr under Orientation:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/quinnanya/4444874386/meta

>From a bit of Googling around, it sounds like there is an actual EXIF
"orientation tag", though different cameras might use it differently,
or store their orientation data in some other way.

~Quinn


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mario Sanchez Prada <msanchez igalia com>
Date: Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 4:08 PM
Subject: Re: A couple Frogr suggestions
To: Quinn Dombrowski <quinn quinndombrowski com>


Hi!

On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 14:30 -0600, Quinn Dombrowski wrote:
> [...]
> This morning I uploaded a whole batch of photos from the last few days
> using Frogr, and it worked great! A couple possible additional
> features came to mind:

Thanks for the suggestions. Overall they all look good to me, see my
comments below...

> 1) Sort photos by date taken option -- I like to keep my photos in
> order by date, but sometimes I end up dropping things into the
> uploader out-of-order. Having a way to automatically arrange them by
> date (maybe in the preferences?) would be great.

I thought several times of this and, do not why but, I always ended up
forgetting about it :-)

But it definitely looks like something workth trying for the next
version, sure! Perhaps we could end some new preferences for that and/or
a toolbar button to sort by date ascending or descending, or something
like that... we'll better know when we start implementing it!

> 2) Show how many MB your upload is, both while you're adding photos
> and while you're doing the upload. Knowing I have 20 photos is okay,
> but the file sizes differ, and knowing the MB gives me a much better
> estimate of how long this is going to take on my really slow home
> internet.

Wonderful idea! And it doesn't seem to be very complicated either so I
guess it will make another good feature for the next release as well :-)

> 3) Rotate the photos to the right orientation-- the portrait photos
> all turn out correctly when they're uploaded, but when I look at them
> in Frogr, they're sideways.

Makes sense, although I'd need to investigate a bit how to know for sure
when a picture should be rotated or not (maybe checking exif info?) and
how (clockwise? counter-clockwise?), but definitely doable I guess.

> Of these, #1 is the only one that I'd consider particularly important;
> the other two would be handy, but don't affect the output when you
> upload the pictures.

I give you my word I'll try to implement #1 and #2 for the next release,
and maybe #3 if it's not much hassle and I can find a nice way to do it
ideally without introducing new dependencies in frogr (perhaps I could
end up needing some kind of exif-related library).

What I can't promise is the due date for that because nowadays, and
specifically during this month of March I'm "a little too much busy"
with my payjob... but probably during April I'll manage to find some
time for that.

For the time being I'll just add your awesome suggestions to the TODO
file of frogr.

Thanks!
Mario

PS: I guess it could be nice ot have this kind of conversations in the
frogr-list mailing list (frogr-list gnome org) so more people could get
involved if they want to. What do you think about joining the ML and
continuing this conversation in there? In case you want to, you can
subscribe to it here:

http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/frogr-list