[Shotwell] Promising!

[Mark]

hello there!

Really nice - an new image viewer for gnome - something i have really
been looking forward to.
Where f-spot is slow, overbloated and has an ugly way of saving images
in per-day-folders, gthumb has a working but outdated interface and no
feature to browse a big collection of images in a time line (an no
in-image-tagging support). 

So big applause to shotwell!

My first impression is... i like it. it looks modern, easy to use, fast
and responsive. Nice:
* nice, easy, functional interface
* nice way of organising images per event or in timeline

But maybe its not too late for some wishes and suggestions:

* make images load faster
In image viewer it takes some time until the image is clearly visible.
If possible: Please, make it faster. Maybe remove the dotty image first
shown - is something like "preloading" the next image possible? -
Decoding jpegs is really slow with libjpeg, isn't it?

* add tag support saved to image file
Adding tags stored in the image files is an important approach to sort a
huge collection

* cropping works great - let me choose the ratio
cropping is as easy and functional as it could be with shotwell - but
for many reasons i need certain aspect ratios. If i could preselect it
or select once and shotwell remembered my choice - cropping a number of
images would be a charm.

* let me choose how long to display an image in slideshowmode 
this is really annoying in f-spot - you can do a lot but not change the
duration an image is shown in a slideshow? I never understood that.
PLease, let me decide...

* keep the way i can work with my keybord - ist nice and simply works!
I tried digikam some days ago - space for next is ok, but backspace to
go back? Try it yourself, it' s no fun.   

* improve remove dialog
well, maybe it is the german translation: Should i "delete" or "keep
files"? "Delete" means delete image in library and corresponding file?
"Keep files" means delete from library only?

* What i like despite all is that original images are untouched. but
maybe an option to save them somewhere i can find them later easily
(hidden folder in original folder? renamed version in original folder?)
would be a nice thing.

I enjoyed supporting shotwell development with my feedback and hope it
will grow to a mighty means!

Thanks so far,

Mark