Re: [Gimp-developer] Save/export, option to go back to old behaviour

[Jon Nordby <jononor gmail com>]

On 19 November 2012 15:21, Robert Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu> wrote:

On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 15:30:38 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 3:28 PM, Alberto Mardegan wrote:
>
>> Reformulating: is it possible for a user *who reads and understands all
>> question dialogs which appear to him/her*, to actually lose the layers
>> when saving to JPEG with gimp 2.6?
>
> Yes.
>
>> If yes, how?
>
> By being overly confident and not forward-thinking.

And guess what?  I've done that on occasion myself.  But I don't blame
my tool for that.

I blame the tool for that, even if this is the status quo in most of todays desktop applications. Software tools should take into account and be able to compensate for our sometimes flawed behaviour.
 
In a future fairytale non-destructive world that we are moving towards, it could perhaps work something like this:

* All actions the user does to a document inside GIMP is automatically stored.
* "Save As" would become an *optional* action, allowing to chose where the document is stored.
* "Save" would be come an *optional* action that allows to describe that particular state of the document, so that particular revisions are easy to find.

* Export would work like now.

In this model, if you you opened a JPEG file, added some layers, did some processing and then exported to another JPEG and quit GIMP - nothing would be lost[1].
All the actions of the document would be stored. The document would appear in
"Recently used Documents" or similar. Exactly like a document that you have explicitly saved.

Such a work-flow would mean that the user is not required to be forward thinking in order to preserve his work. He or she can focus 100% on the task at hand (here, creating a derivate JPEG file from an original JPEG image), without having to actively keep in mind to not make destructive actions.

1. Tthere would of course be no prompt in this case.
Alexandre: this is my proposal for the better image-exported-but-not-saved prompt. Make it obsolete.

-- 
Jon Nordby - www.jonnor.com