[Shotwell] Some observations and criticisms

[Nate Homier]

Hi Shotwell developers!  I like the Shotwell program very much!  I will
start with the praise first.

The Shotwell program maintains the thumbnails very well, even with
extremely fast scrolling speed.  Compare this with my current photo
program, Gthumb which does a very poor job at maintaining thumbnails at
high speed scrolling.  Excellent as lack of thumbnails during scrolling
makes navigation hard.

The dark Grey background very nicely enhances the photos, good choice.
I like the minimal UI as well.  It seems clean and sleek in the UI
compared to what I feel is a messy UI for F-Spot.  Finally a free
software program has a shadow fill.  Picasa has had shadow fill for a
long time and now Shotwell has it.  Shadow fill really makes those dark
photos a lot better.  The editing options for the photos seems to have
hit the sweet spot, not too Gimpish and not too Eye of Gnome.  Start up
and shutdown seems very fast.  Overall, a very excellent job Shotwell
developers!

And now my criticisms. :(

When I start the program, it comes up in a window that is not maximized.
As a result the window only occupies a portion of the screen.  It is
quite usable in this state and I don't really have a quibble with this
behavior as default on first run.  What I do have a problem with is when
I maximize the program and then shutdown the program it still starts up
in a non maximized window.  I would expect the program to respect my
previous maximized state.  I really don't like it when programs think
they know better than me at what I like.  If it's any consolation,
Gthumb has this same behavior.

The UI has the events feature for finding photos by date.  Good feature
but it throws all photos on that date together.  I feel this could be
improved if one could use events for a specific folder or camera roll.
Lets say you have 2 rolls, one for Disneyland CA. and one for Disneyland
Paris.  Now lets say those trips were at the same time with 2 families
and now the photos are on 1 computer.  Events now throws those 2
separate trips all in together.  What I need is a way to use events for
a specific roll.

Have you ever used Google's Picasa?  If you have you will see how it
imports from cameras and other media.  Lets look at how it creates the
directory structure.  It pops up a dialog box asking you to create an
album name along with a description and various misc. stuff.  When you
go into the Windows "My Pictures" or "Pictures" you will see a folder
with the name you entered into that Picasa dialog box.  Lets say you
enter Disneyland CA, when you look in "My Pictures" you will see a
folder called "Disneyland CA".  Each import into Picasa creates a
separate folder in "My Pictures".  Heres my point.  Picasa creates a
very human folder structure that is easy to navigate.  I think that most
people can remember the names but not specific dates.  Shotwell as of
version 0.3.2 creates a very obtuse folder structure of exact dates.
For conventional digging around in folders using Windows explorer or
Gnome's Nautilus, it is very hard to remember when you did something on
a specific date.  Exploring a Picasa created folder structure is very
easy.

Another reason for Picasa's success with it's folder structure is cross
platform compatibility with other operating systems and photo programs.
I know that Gthumb and Picasa will always be compatible with each other
because their folder creation is the same.  I can load a Picasa
directory on NTFS and know Gthumb picks it up right away.  I don't have
to use Picasa to browse Picasa created directories.  I can load a Gthumb
directory in windows and know I don't have to use Gthumb.  See where I'm
going?  If I mount a Shotwell created directory in Windows via Samba I
can not use Picasa for photo management and using Windows Explorer will
be very difficult.  Once I start using Shotwell, I must ALWAYS use
Shotwell.  Shotwell's cross platform compatibility stinks.  If it is any
consolation for you, F-Spot has this same stinky folder layout.

As of 0.3.2, Shotwell attempts at import from disk is stupid.  It
attempts to import Gthumb .xml and .comments files.  Why?  Just winds up
giving overly complicated errors messages to users for no good reason.

I wonder if the full size previews are causing disk imports to take
longer than is necessary.  It seemed to take forever to import from
disk.  Gthumb import just feels faster.  Would import go any faster in
reality if smaller previews were used?

Would be nice if one could also navigate in the left side pane the same
way Gthumb and Picasa do it.  If Shotwell were to gain an option in the
left pane to navigate like Gthumbs folder navigation, it would also be
nice if clicking on specific folders also automatically scrolled the
right side album view to the correct pictures, just like Picasa.

I assume you are generating your own thumbnails for cross platform
reasons.  If not, then why don't you take advantage of the operating
systems native thumbnailing?  In Gnome, in my test a single roll is
already consuming 5MB of space and I have dozens of other rolls as well.
I would prefer that you take advantage of Gnomes .thumbnails feature.  I
believe that Gthumb does it this way.  And on KDE you should use
whatever they use and Windows, Mac OS you should use their native
facilities as well.

Slide show uses a black background.  I would like to see this changed to
dark Grey and Ideally be user configurable.

I think this is enough for now.  I am using the Ubuntu PPAs and I am
currently at version 0.3.2.  Overall I am very impressed and I am very
excited.  Gthumb does not really cut it for me, but it's better than
F-Spot.  I wish all the Shotwell developers the best and I will continue
to check each new version.  Who knows maybe this is the free software
program that winds up beating Picasa.

Nate Homier.