[Shotwell] Basic video edition : rotation

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi!

> IS PHOTO ALBUM SOFTWARE not full featured video editing suite!

I 100% agree that it is not useful to add all functions one may happen 
to want to handle media into Shotwell - even though it is more then a 
photo album software.

In my understanding, Shotwell is some kind of a content (library) 
management tool. Content used to be pictures, and covers video now, too. 
Management means here that one can maintain content in a library. This 
requires metadata handling, sort & find, im- and export.

I would be very careful to mix this with content authoring. There are 
some cases, such as the feature to rotate images transfered from a 
digital camera, that are very useful even though they mess up the 
separation between maintaining a library and editing its content. The 
reason is that it would add a huge overhead to a small taks doing this 
externally.

Rotate by 90 degree is very, very simple for an image, and people may 
have hundreds of pictures that need to be rotated, so here it is 
useability that backs such a feature. Rotate a video by 90 degree is 
something that will be applied to one video (I hope noone is taking 
movies tilted all the time...), and requires quite a lot of 
implementation development. It is very little overhead to do this in an 
external application, that can be used to do all preprocessing such as 
transcoding, adding a title, setting a resolution and such BEFORE 
importing it into the library.

There is still quite a lot of stuff that can be done to improve 
Shotwell's performance as a media library management tool (e.g. file 
format support, exchange with other libraries, ...). I would hope that 
development focuses on these, instead on making Shotwell an application 
trying to do "something with media".

Cheers, Lars.