Re: [Usability] time stamps and privacy

[Yuval Levy <gnome08 sfina com>]

Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 17:06 +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
> > /me looks at the stack of DVDs with years of photos on.  Don't make me
> > re-thumbnail them everytime I insert a disc.

...


> So we'd just annoy the majority of people in order
> to fail to solve the problem of a minority of people.

well analyzed, Shaun.

with locally stored thumbs, the author of the DVDs can store the thumbs 
on the DVD and that's no longer a problem.


Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote:
> Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
>> The solution to the problem
>> brought up here should IMHO be that thumbnails of files on removable
>> devices _can_ be created but that they should always be purged
>> _immediately_ after it is disconnected. More generally speaking,
>> thumbnails of inaccessible files on any volume should be purged, just
>> with a lower priority.
>
> Cool idea!
>
> There is a complication, however: the thumbnails are stored using a
> hashed version of the original filename. It is not possible to tell from
> the thumbnail itself which file it corresponds to (one way hashing, in
> other words).


should not be a problem with locally stored thumbs, although another 
problem would arise: what happens when the originals are deleted or 
their permissions are changed? now that I think of it, what happens 
currently with such a scenario? orphaned files in ~/.thumbnails/?

I don't know of a solution for this sort of linking, but I wish there 
was, so that XMP sidecars and other meta files could be linked too (and 
copied when dragging and dropping the master file).

I'm surprised how little the GUI metaphor has changed since the Xerox 
Parc times. We're still browsing volumes, folders and files 
hierarchically. OK for a floppy but IMO inadequate for today's media. 
And IMO OK from a CLI but not from a GUI. I expect a GUI to add 
usability value.

The solution to the specific problem of thumbs is IMO *choice*. Put a 
.thumbs file at the root of every file system. If it exists, thumbnail 
all files on that volume automatically. If it does not, don't.

The owner of the media (hence root and not user directory) should decide 
if thumbs are permitted. For RW media this is easily changed to the 
preferences of the users and for R-only media the author can make the 
decision at authoring time.

I've not tested it, but I wonder how all of those programs that rely on 
thumbnails react if I chmod 000 and chown root:root my .thumbnails 
folder? surely ugly, and would not achieve the higher usability that I 
hope we can achieve together by spinning these idea further.

Thanks everybody for the stimulating thoughts.
Yuv