Re: [Gimp-user] Save v Export behaviour

[Brendan Scott <disposableemail apps opensourcelaw biz>]

On 12/05/2013 12:28 AM, Simon Budig wrote:
> Brendan Scott (disposableemail apps opensourcelaw biz) wrote:
> > What I have also said is that if
> > the purpose of the distinction is to preserve work, it didn't serve
> > that function for me.  That suggests to me that the UI "may need more
> > thought".
> >
> > You ought to ask your question of someone else.
>
> To me it is entirely unclear, what in your workflow differenciates a
> "good" warning dialog from a "bad" warning dialog.

It "may be" that it's not about warning dialogs.  At the moment I'm trying to just describe the issue I have 
faced.

> Without a hint from you we're 100% in the "Do-What-I-Mean-Button"
> ballpark which is not really helping with the "more thought" we might
> need.
>
> I gathered from your mail, that you lost work because the save/export
> distinction conditioned you into clicking the warning away. So, if you
> don't want us to remove the warning, what are our options?

I will assume then that you haven't seen my earlier posts.

Here is some more detail.   Ordinarily (since May when I started using GIMP regularly-ish), I work in xcf and 
have no desire to export except maybe once at the end.  So, the default set up suits me most of the time.

There are two occasions where I used export rather than save.  The first was doing some levels and cropping 
on photos I had taken (scores, but I've not processed them all yet).  That went swimmingly, but the close 
dialogs were annoying.  The second was editing out a background on 70 odd (poorly-) chroma keyed photos (to 
be composited with a background by someone else).  I got through a small number before realising that I was 
exporting to jpg, losing the transparent areas I'd added.

I lost some work because of the format I was using and the save/export distinction didn't avoid that.  Partly 
this was because I was habituated to ignore the save as xcf warning.  This is probably because the warning 
appears no matter what the risk is (or, in the case of my cropping etc, when there was no risk).  The save 
warnings are false positives because they are triggered by an irrelevant condition (ie close with export but 
no save).  The true trigger for a warning was that I was trying to export an image to an inconsistent format 
(ie image has transparency but format doesn't support it).

I am confident that I would have taken more notice of a warning (because it would be out of the ordinary) if 
it: (a) didn't pop up the false positives; but (b) did pop up an inconsistent format warning. Apparently this 
functionality or something like it was in 2.6?