[Shotwell] Use cases of shotwell

[Clinton Rogers]

Hi again,

2011/8/26 k_bx <k.bx at ya.ru>

>
> I think now I understand my frustration better a little. It is about that
> shotwell's collections and photos/videos dates.
>
> 1. My android camera has a timestamp bug that writes wrong date timestamp
> to videos (this is a known one on shotwell's redmine, but that's not the
> point), so shotwell sees those videos as they're in 1945. Also, I often get
> photos from people with wrong date set, so I'm talking not about just
> android-bug-specific situation. So when I drag&drop that video (from 1945)
> to my event with it's photos (with the right date) it becomes showed as
> "1945" (the whole event with all the photos). That frustrated me.
>
>
Ah, got it.  What you're seeing is that the event is being changed such that
the start point of the event is the wrong date, when what you were expecting
is that either the photos and/or videos you moved into the event would get
their own (wrong) dates set to the (correct) date of the event, or, if
nothing else, the date of the event shouldn't change.

While the event date not changing would most likely confuse a lot of users,
it certainly seems like the first option might be useful in a lot of cases,
particularly for people with a lot of undated photographs (for example,
someone with a large collection of scanned prints or slides), and I'll bring
it up with the team here for discussion.  In the meantime, though, it is
possible to control this to a limited degree by manually setting the date
and time (via Photo -> Adjust Date and Time...).


> 2. I decided to create collection "wallpapers" for my desktop wallpapers.
> It was in "Undated" when I created it (and filled with wallpapers). I added
> there another wallpaper just now that has date in it's metainformation
> somehow and the whole "wallpapers" event just jumped to folder "2002 -> July
> -> Wallpapers".


> 3. As I've already mentioned, people often give me photos with wrong dates
> set. So I have 3 events with photos from same event just because two of them
> have wrong date set (they're grouped by wrong date). So I drag and drop
> those events with wrong date to event with right date, but that moves the
> event to some other place.
>

Again, setting the date manually will control the jumping around somewhat,
but you're right, this is far from perfect.


> So generally, the whole thing that frustrates me is that when you move
> something to event you don't expect it to move somewhere. And when you move
> photos with wrong date (or date that shouldn't be there at all) -- you
> expect it to change the date or at least do nothing, but not move the whole
> event because wrong date corrects the "computed event date".
>

> I did my best, but it's somehow hard to explain for me, so if you have any
> questions -- please just ask them.


If I've understood correctly, the upshot of all this is you'd like to be
able to force an event to not move around, even if there's a photo with a
different date put into it, and not have to worry about manually setting the
date each time.  I'll mention this to the crew here and open a 'feature'
ticket for it - it might be helpful to have an option somewhere in the menus
for locking an event to a date (or even undated, if the user so desires)
somehow.


> Thanks!
>

You're welcome; thank you for taking time to write back.

Cheers,
-c