Re: [PATCH] Frame large images with a small file size.

[Jaap Haitsma <jaap haitsma org>]

Alexander Larsson wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 17:00 +0100, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
>
> > Alexander Larsson wrote:
> >
> > > On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 23:11 +0100, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > > > Say I have an image on my desktop. The file is 500k, so its thumbnailed.
> > > > > I didn't do anything to the icon, so its showed at 96 pixels size, from
> > > > > the thumbnail.
> > > > >
> > > > > Now I select "Stretch Icon" from the menu and make the icon 200x200
> > > > > pixels. If we continue to use the thumbnail for this it'll look pretty
> > > > > fuzzy. What I would like is for it to switch to using the actual file as
> > > > > the thumbnail for sizes > 128 pixels. This would make the icon look
> > > > > crisp and nice.
> > > >
> > > > OK I got it, but if I zoom in the thumbnail size also gets larger then 
> > > > 128. Nautilus would become very slow for people using a high zoom level. :-(
> > >
> > >
> > > I guess. Maybe we could first read the thumbnails and use those, and
> > > then read the real files in the background while displaying the folder?
> >
> > It's an option but won't that look a bit funny first the image is fuzzy 
> > and then after quite some CPU cycles they will get crisp? And people 
> > using high zoom level will see a high cpu usage.
>
>
> Why? This is quite similar to how thumbnailed files themselves look.
> First they are icons, then they turn into images. I don't think people
> using high zoom levels is all that common. Especially not for images,
> its sort of useless since you don't see more information from the image
> as you zoom. This would actually fix that.
OK got it.


> > Another idea. Thumbnails could be saved in the size specified by the 
> > app. All programs using thumbnails just read the thumbnail. If a 
> > thumbnail is requested by an app it first reads the size of the preview. 
> > If that size is large enough or within a certain range it will use that 
> > one otherwise it creates a new thumbnail file.
> > Option there of course is overwriting the old one or saving it to a new 
> > file so that both sizes will be available.
> >
> > What do you think about that?
>
>
> I don't quite get it. I don't think we should be constantly re-
> generating thumbnails like that. And creating thumbnails that aren't
> shareable with other apps. I think highly zoomed icons is an uncommon
> case that we could either just totally ignore (as we do now), or have
> some special casing of.

The idea would be to have say a:
gnome-thumbnail-get-thumbnail(const char* uri, int size);
function which every app should use.

If there is a thumbnail present with a size which does not need a lot of 
upscaling the the thumbnail is returned directly otherwise the thumbnail 
is first made at the requested size and saved to disk. So it's 
completely transparent to applications.

Jaap