Re: [gthumb-list] ext branch first impressions

[Jef Driesen <jefdriesen hotmail com>]

Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote:
> > I don't think a standard user wants to change the importer preferences 
> > every single time he imports photos from a camera, I don't know why this 
> > happens to you, maybe you want to list your use cases so I can better 
> > understand your needs. The group-by-month option seems useful to me, on 
> > the other hand if the custom format can be avoided I'll be happier 
> > because it's really hard to understand even for an advanced user.
>
> I switch constantly between three use cases:
>
> - personal photos to /photos/2009-08 (i.e., grouped by month)
> - my son's photos to /photos/2009-08-John (custom format, yyyy-mm-John)
> - work photos to /workdir/new (no grouping at all)
>
> The trunk UI accommodates all that very nicely. I think any serious 
> photographer will have their own organizing scheme, which is why the 
> custom format codes are nice to have. The ability to combine something 
> like "Smith Wedding" and the date will be handy.
>
> I'm not saying the trunk UI is perfect. But it is useful!

I import my pictures into subfolders according to this format:

YYYYMMDD <event>

The date/time part allows me to quickly locate photos by date, because 
they are sorted chronologically. The <event> part gives a quick 
description of the photos. It could be the name of the place where the 
photos were taken, the name of the person on the photos, etc.

I usually import immediately after each photo shoot, thus all the 
imported photos go into a single subfolder. So for me it's nice to be 
able to set a fixed destination directory and use the custom format for 
the subfolder creation. But in my case the format changes with every import!

Maybe the advanced settings can be hidden below an expander? That way 
they don't take any space for most users, but they are quickly available 
for more advanced users.

An other thing I *really* don't like is the checkbox based selection in 
the importer. First of all, I prefer being able to click the image, 
because it's much larger than the tiny checkbox. However the main 
problem is that selecting many (but not all) images is very hard. I do 
not delete images from the camera after importing, as a temporary backup 
mechanism. Thus when I import new images, I want to skip the old ones. 
In the trunk version, I do this by selecting the first new images, 
scrolling to the last one, and shift-select that to select all new 
images. This works very fast, but in the new dialog, I have to click 
every single image. Not very convenient if you want to import a few 
hundred pictures!