Re: [Usability] Re: example of nice usability feature

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Mikael Hallendal wrote:

> Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2004 12:04:43 +0100
> From: Mikael Hallendal <micke imendio com>
> To: Marius Andreiana <mandreiana rdslink ro>
> Cc: fedora-devel <fedora-devel-list redhat com>,
>      Usability List <usability gnome org>
> Subject: [Usability] Re: example of nice usability feature
>
> tor 2004-03-04 klockan 10.37 skrev Marius Andreiana:
> > Hi
>
> Hi,
>
> Moving to usability list instead of desktop-devel.
>
> > As we were talking about usability (followup on ESR), I saw yesterday a
> > nice feature at a friend when we were browsing an image colloection from
> > his camera with ACD See on MS Windows.
> >
> > On images which needed rotating, we rotated them (pressing a key or an
> > icon) and the viewer automatically saved them to disk rotated. This is
> > an excellent feature.

I actually thought this behaviour was horrible.
I dont expect my files on disk to be overwritten without being warned.

Autosave is a useful feature but if it isn't used consistantly it
can be somewhat annoying to those who are used to save on demand.

I'm assuming the automatic save is occuring becuase you are losslessly
rotating JPEG (or possibly EXIF) images.  [And strictly speaking it isn't
techincally gauranteed to be losseless either, when I say lossless I mean
that the JPEG is not reencoded, some edge pixels can get trimmed as part
of this process]

> > In Linux I have to start gimp, rotate and save it, for every image which
> > needs that. I know there are nautilus scripts for that, but if
> > EOG/gthumb would do the job automatically would be great.

The GIMP is not designed for batch image processing and isn't good at it.
ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick are much better suited to graphics
processing of this variety.

If you are using JPEG images then jpegtran is an extremly useful
command line utility.

If I recall correctly the latest versions of both gThumb and EOG have
support for lossless rotation of JPEGs, but I forget if this means they
modify the file on disk or not or how easily you can modify multiple
images.

> I think it would be pretty nice if Nautilus could look at the exif data
> and rotate the images accordingly. For example my camera sets the
> rotation information in exif, would be nice if Nautilus looked at this
> and rotated thumbnails correctly.

would be good, although I wouldn't assume that Nautilus was to blame.

> Not sure if we want Nautilus to actually rotate the images and remove
> the exif tag? Otherwise it would be nice to have a nice way of doing
> that in GThumb. Gallery (web application for showing pictures) does this
> when you upload the images, but you often want to crop/retouch the
> images before uploading so you have to rotate them manually before.

Seeing as you mention crop a while ago I finally found a 'lossless'
jpegcrop utility a while ago and I wish more graphics programs could do
this.  At the time I mentioned lossless JPEG manipulations but Sven the
lead developer of GIMP considered it beyond the scope of the GIMP.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/