Gtk4 Rewrite #713
Replies: 18 comments 8 replies
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Right now my use of the default Photos application is limited. I use it to view images and its relevant metadata, and make very simple changes(rotation, cropping). Never used it for raw photo editing (darktable/rawtherapee). Also never used it to view an entire folder full of photos(also darktable), nevertheless when I tried just now to import photos from a different drive the application unfortunately crashed immediately. Filters would be a nice feature, also would be nice to have blur, annotations and free form select for editing screenshots(would also be nice if it could be integrated into the Screenshots work flow, meaning I need not use ksnip). Navigation using date and person would be useful. I almost never have location data on the photos I take using my camera, and those are mostly the ones I would open on my desktop(photographs from my phone which do have location data go directly to google photos). |
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I think the only thing I've ever used photos for has been:
A couple of features I'd like to see would be some basic markup features like text and drawing as well as some kind of integration with the screenshot and screen snipping tools that elementary has. If I ever need to do anything other than that, I'll probably end up opening a dedicated tool like Gimp anyways. |
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I like to use Photos for organization and fast edits, such as cropping, rotating, annotating. Maybe a basic filter here or there (bonus points for plugins/extensible). I don't use anything like slideshows or such. Any advanced editing, I'd use darktable or gimp for. It would be cool if you could (again, extending) right click the image and "edit in..." where it would then be passed back- almost like Picassa or iPhoto did. I don't know that it needs to figure out that I have screenshots or wallpapers. But overall, at the core, I just would like a fast, accessory-like Photos app. Advanced stuff can be handled by the big apps that already exist for this purpose. Photos should just be a decent, basic, application. |
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I don't use Photos because it doesn't work with small images. It has a maximum zoom level and uses interpolation, so it's useless for things like icons and pixel art. If it could work as well for tiny images as it does for big images, it'd have everything I need (as a basic image previewer), so that'd be my "one feature". |
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I will be sharing my thoughts as a student who, in this pandemic, uses screenshot utility as a new way of "note-taking" (teachers won't share powerpoints ).
I personally think that rewriting it is better, as I find myself preferring to manage photos with the file manager more often than the photos app itself. Just my thoughts :) |
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album-2022-07-09_14.02.45.mp4In my practicing, I tried to make it as professional as possible so it can serve as basis of some sort if possible😅 But, I would be honored to have it really adopted.. If you'd like to look at the code, it is at https://github.com/ZenitsuDev/album credit is also due to Alexander Mikhaylenko's transition and animation work. |
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This doesn't look like it has any way to browse through the images, or at least that wasn't demonstrated. It shows the user going back to the gallery for every single image they want to view, instead of just going directly to the next and previous image. It also has large gaps between the thumbnails, and has slow (non-instant) animations for doing things, making browsing the images a bit cumbersome, compared to something like IrfanView which is much quicker. |
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Well, it was just a prototype I made and could definitely do lots of improving. However, it aims to demonstrate the most basic operation of a photo library, which is to be able to view photo from a library. |
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Thanks for your effort. I'm sorry if my criticism came across as rude. I certainly appreciate your achievement of opening images and displaying them with the correct colors, aspect ratio, etc. It's more than can be said for any project I've made from scratch. I look forward to improvements in usability with this solid foundation. |
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Worry not! Thanks for pointing out points of improvement |
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Copy many aspects of IrfanView and you'll have something incredibly awesome: an easy-to-use, lean, fast image viewer which can view all the images in a directory, take an image pasted from the clipboard and save it however you want, draw some simple shapes and lines if necessary, crop, rotate, resize with choice of algorithm, swap color channels, count unique colors, and see detailed image properties and metadata. A photo viewer should do at least that and not too much more. Really, just refer to IrfanView, a very-unfortunately proprietary masterpiece. |
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Most of the time I use the Photos just to view, crop and rotate pictures/screenshots. My guess is that this is the case for the majority of the people, hence most of the effort should be put in making this basic features perfect! One frustrating thing regarding cropping and rotating is that I often need to use them together: I open an image, decide to crop it, I notice that it is not perfectly straight so I rotate it a little bit, but now I need to crop it again and so on... the frustrating part is that to do it on the current Photos app is that I have to switch back and forth between the cropping and rotating tool. As an example, take every default photo app on mobile phones, they allow you to do this two tings in a very intuitive way, at the same time.
but also having a a vary basic rotation tool, like the one available on Akira for example, WHILE cropping would be still great. Regarding raw photo editing i sometimes do some basic photo editing (adjusting exposure, contrast etc.) and I generally appreciate if the app handles raw files since the final result is better when using those. Regarding navigation / organization / workflow I don't use a specific app at all. I just open the file I'm interested in from the file system. One thing that I would appreciate though would be to view also the others pictures in the same folder as the currently opened one (similarly as in the Preview app on macOS or in a bottom bar like in Adobe Lightroom). Regarding annotations, I'm a student and I need quite often to add text and/or draw shapes on screenshots (as I did on the image above!). To do that I found the Annotator app by Trevor Williams which works great (@zenitsudev take I look at it if you don't know it, you may find it very useful 😃 ). For this reason I don't feel the need to have the same functionality in the Photos app, but I can see how for some it might be more convenient. |
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Cool! I'll take a look at it. Thank you |
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Helloo! Regarding the Photos app, I think it is really nice to be able to just open the app and see the collection of all your photos, apps that aren't useful when directly opening them are a bit wasteful in my opinion. I can't really comment on how many people use the Raw photo functionality, although when it comes to user experience, I think it is nice to have a centralized hub to view photos, even camera ones. I also don't know how many people actually use the slideshow feature, neither how much work it would be to maintain it, but it is a neat feature. If you had to remove a feature, I think the Raw photo editing might be a good candidate, it seems a little excessive if the goal of the app is to be a simple picture viewing app with some simple editing involved, and if someone needs this feature, they are more than likely already using Darktable in their workflow. I do think that importing photos from cameras and viewing Raw photos are great features, however. I believe that it would be a very welcome addition to add the possibility of navigating the home file system, to filter the photos shown in the app. Many people have folders inside the Images home directory, and especially if there are many pictures to be loaded, the app can get a bit chaotic / overwhelming to navigate and find specific files, even with the automatic dates. Sometimes you just don't need to see all of your pictures at the same time. Another thing it could be nice to add is image metadata viewing / cleaning. One thing that is a bit confusing is the slight differences in UI and functionality when opening a photo through the app directly vs opening a photo through the Files app. If you are used to cropping images, then right clicking and exporting it to save it, you might be thrown off by the right click export option not being available when opening a picture through the Files app. Likewise, if you are used to just using the "Save Picture With a Different Name" option to export your changes, you might not even be aware that an "Export" option exists when using the app directly. That also applies to deleting a photo when opening it directly: No "Delete" option, you have to press the delete key. Overall, I do think it is a fantastic app, although it could use a little bit more of consistency and navigability. Sorry if the text ended up a bit long winded, I'm not sure if I should treat the discussion as a thread or not. :) |
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The only thing i miss, is the ability to fullscreen photo, without slideshow. |
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I do not use Photos a huge amount for raw editing at the moment but I am probably a bit of an outlier in that my typical workflow is only a couple features beyond what Photos currently does and so would be pretty happy to get the last couple of them, and just use Photos solely since it generally feels much snappier and cleaner to me. For organizing I would need it to just watch a folder, let me do some rating by number or color, and let me group them based on a named event or just stay with the default dates. For editing I already said that what it has is close to what I would want for raw editing, just would like local contrast and some color channel control. I think those would be the really essential features to add to have me stick with using the app. With exporting, I don't think the uploading to a service is really necessary or maybe to me the selection is just outdated feeling? If I wanted to upload my photos somewhere it would be something like SmugMug or Squarespace or something. I wonder if this is something that Online Accounts is meant for? I think slideshows and support for videos is not really needed and can be tossed. If keeping the service uploading up to date is hard, I don't think it would be a huge loss personally. I find the raw file thumbnail generation very frustrating as I have Nextcloud watch the folder and don't want it to get riddled with thumbnails when I believe most modern raw formats provide a preview image in them. Or perhaps other applications just store them in a hidden folder elsewhere. That said I don't think it would be unreasonable to scale back the scope of what the app's core functionality is and wouldn't be disappointed if it meant a cleaner code base that doesn't make eOS devs shudder when they take a look at it! |
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I think it is important to consider what Photos should accomplish in other form factors. If eOS ends up on a tablet or mobile device, things like darktable become much less viable as a solution for raw editing. Should Photos provide something basic like you find on iOS and Android? |
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Maybe an idea... Can we have an estimation on how difficult a feature is to implement and then we can decide if it's really worth it? I use a lot of things about the photos app and so everyone else. So at least this way we can have a better understanding on what the difficult points are. |
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Some examples of functionality:
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Absolutely. Tbh I didn't know about this feature in Photos, but probably I'd use a photo editing app for such a complex task.
How I use Photos:
I definitely never use the mentioned slideshows feature or the Facebook/Flickr/etc integrations.
Pinch to zoom and swipe to navigate between photos (like with arrow keys)! These would make the experience with a touchpad/touchscreen so much better!
I prefer chronological ordering + folders view.
I wouldn't differentiate different kinds of images from others. |
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Just create something that fits the function of viewing one's photo library and albums in an intuitive and simple way like MacOS photos. Being able to import photos from DCIM is a must, only really because it requires the Photos app itself to index items. |
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Features:
I only use it to open photos / screenshots from Files. So when going to the prev/next image I would really appreciate it if it could follow the current image's folder's sorting, see: #14. |
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Very exciting! A few ideas: Tenets:
MVP Features (in no particular order):
Nice to have features:
Ditch:
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First thanks for your work and I'm very pleased by the possibility to have my favourite Photo manager refreshed and enhanced :D 1 Incremental import and watch auto-import (as it is) Features I do not use personally 1 Incremental import and watch auto-import (as it is) Features I do not use personally |
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I was pleasantly surprised by the functionality of Photos, very similar to a reference app .
What is missing: |
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We're starting to port apps to Gtk4 now and one I'm really not looking forward to is Photos. This is a really old and extremely complex code base and it still heavily uses things that have been deprecated for a long time. Something I've been thinking about is rethinking the scope of Photos and starting fresh with a more focused goal, so I'd like to start a discussion about what people feel the scope/purpose of the default photos app is and isn't to determine if that's realistic or it would be better to try to port the existing code base
Things I'd like specific feedback on:
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