[Shotwell] Call for testing

Wed Jun 16 16:31:12 PDT 2010

Hi Martin,

Great work!  Sounds like you've really gone through Shotwell with a
fine-toothed comb.  I've ticketed many of these.  If you're interested in
watching any or all of them, I'll let you add yourself to the appropriate
cc: list.

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 2:52 PM, Martin Olsson <mnemo at minimum.se> wrote:

> * When I do "Show in File Manager" I would like the specific
> file pre-selected in the nautilus window that appears. I really
> find this annoying.
>

I do too, but I could not find a way to launch Nautilus and have it
highlight a specific file -- it would only open a directory window.  If you
run Nautilus from the command line ("nautilus /home/jim/test.jpg") I get
this message:

Could not display "/home/jim/test.jpg"
The location is not a folder

Maybe there's a way with Nautilus actions to have it highlight a file in the
directory?  I still can't find a solution to this.  I've ticketed it:
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2129

> * When I use "Set as Desktop Background" on a 2000x3000
> (i.e. non-landscape orientation) photo, only a part of the
> photo is visible on my 1680x1050 screen. It's nice that you
> switched from the current "scale to fit" to another approach
> where you add padding instead so that the whole photo is
> guaranteed to be on screen (this is much better than the
> current "scale to fit width" which will sometimes crop
> faces halfway through etc). Maybe you can use a PNG so that
> the padding is transparent (does that mean the bgcolor in
> the GNOME appearence dialog is used? not sure...) Otherwise
>
black is probably fine.
>

Our thinking is that black is a better border for photos than allowing the
theme color to come through the transparency.  (That's also how we display
photos in full-window and fullscreen mode, for example.)  I'm not sure an
image with a lot of transparency would look good with many background
colors.

> * Workflow issue; two persons take photos at a party/trip or
> whatever and later share photos with each other. Since the
> photos are from the same day, Shotwell mixes the two
> different sets of photos into a single event. This is a problem
> because I might want to show someone just my photos.
> Also, if this wasn't a party but some sort of professional
> photo shot, it's critical to know which photos
> where taken by whom for copyright reasons etc.
> Looking at camera EXIF is not sufficient since
> people might very well have the same camera.
> This can be solved by implementing "autotag with tag BLAH on import"
> but I would personally prefer if the default was to import
> each set of photos into a named event instead.
>

The current code should only include photos in the same event when they're
imported at the same time.  That is, if you import 10 photos from a camera,
Shotwell generates events for those photos.  If you then import another 10
photos, you should get new events, and not photos mixed in with the old
events.  If you're seeing this, please let us know, that's a bug.

> * Import the JPG linked below. Pango injection attack ftw! :-)
> http://temp.minimum.se/shotwell_other/pango_needs_escaping.tgz
> (shotwell:17678): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to set text from markup due to
> error parsing markup: Error on line 1: Entity did not end with a semicolon;
> most likely you used an ampersand character without intending to start an
> entity - escape ampersand as &
> What you need to do is to take the tags through:
> http://www.valadoc.org/glib-2.0/GLib.Markup.printf_escaped.html
>
>
Good catch: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2139

I also noted this bug with your sample photo:
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2140

> * The "Browse" button under "Preferences" would use some padding love,
> it looks too compact with the image right next to the word "Browse".
>

I compared it to the Browse button in Rhythm Box's Preferences dialog, it
looks to be only 1 or 2 pixels off.  Still, I've ticketed:
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2130

> * The Preferences dialog should be resizable. I, for one, tried to make
> it bigger so I could read the full path set for "import photos to".
>

http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2131

> * Pressing ALT-E, ALT-R, ALT-I in "Preferences", don't work; i.e. console
> says it all:
> (shotwell:18398): Gtk-WARNING **: Couldn't find a target for a mnemonic
> activation.
>
> * Inside "Preferences"; ALT-R is bound to both "Browse"-button and
> "External RAW editor".
>
>
Both in http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2132

> * Open a specific photo, hit F11 to go fullscreen (this makes gnome-panel
> go away)
> and then click "Red Eye" in the toolbar. Now gnome-panel appears again,
> which is a
> bit untidy. I see this on a clean Ubuntu 10.04
>

Ticketed: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2141

> * When I do "File::Import" Shotwell asks me if I want to make copies of the
> images
> or link directly. However, if I drag files to the Shotwell window, it
> doesn't ask
> (I think it might just link to the external photo in this case which might
> cause
> users to accidentally delete them when they "move to trash" later on). I
> think it
> should ask in this case as well just to keep things clear.
>

This is a new change: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1602  We had numerous
user requests for this because they felt copying was wasteful of disk
resources.  Drag-and-drop does offer a way to force an "ask": if you press
and hold the Alt key while dragging, the cursor will turn into a question
mark and the dialog appears on the drop.  (This is similar to Nautilus'
behavior.)

> * Resize the shotwell window so that it consomes about 25% of the screen,
> then moved
> it to the bottom right quadrant of the screen. Select some photos and hit
> "Slideshow".
> Then press Escape to exit the slideshow. Now the Shotwell window has been
> moved to
> 0,0 instead so the Shotwell window is located in the top left quadrant of
> the screen.
>

This is a known bug: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1462

> * If I open a photo and press CTRL-D to open the "Adjust" dialog.
> Then I can't reach the top widget by pressing TAB (i.e. where you
> move the light-point and dark-point in the histogram or whatever
> those things are called). Accessibility-wise it would be nice
> if this feature was usable with keyboard only setups (making it
>
much easier to use with screenreaders etc).
>

Ticketed: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2133

> * At the email/password screen under "File::Publish::Picasa::Login"
> the keybindings ALT-E for e-mail and ALT-P for password are shown
> using mnemonics but they don't work.
>

Ticketed: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2134

> * Previously, one could extract debug info to the terminal
> using "SHOTWELL_LOG=1 shotwell" but now it's necessary to
> use "SHOTWELL_LOG=1 SHOTWELL_LOG_FILE=:console: shotwell".
> I think the latter environment variable should be set to
> console by default so it works even if you use the old way.
>

Logging has changed a bit; Shotwell now generates a log to disk
automatically (in ~/.cache/shotwell).  This can be attached to tickets and
is added to bug reports via Apport.  Because of this, we wanted to allow the
user to (a) specify where to put the file exactly, and (b) still make it
available on the console.

More thinking could go into how to make the log more easily accessible to
interested users and developers: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2135

> * If I select a photo and "Photos :: Adjust Time & Date" and
> change the exposure date by a large amount like a couple of
> days then the photos are moved out of the current viewport
> but they are still selected. I think it would be better if
> you called something like viewport.scroll_to_selection() after
> the exposure date has been changed, just to make sure that
> the selected photos are always visible to the user.
>

Ticketed: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2136

> * I don't use AM/PM time since I live in Europe.
> So I'd prefer if the "Adjust Time & Date" dialog was adjusted
> to my locale and thus didn't show AM/PM but instead a 24-hour
> clock. If I right click the Date+Time in gnome-panel and select
> Preferences, I've got 24-hour clock configured in there so
> maybe Shotwell can read this setting from
> "/apps/panel/applets/clock_screen0/prefs/format" or similar?
>

Ticketed: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2137

> * The print preview dialog pre-select the "Letter" paper size
> and also happily informs me that an A4 is 8.27 inch x 11.69 inch
> but we use "cm" here and most europeans print on A4 papers.
> This repros even if I go into "System::Administration::Language Support",
> switch to the "Text" TAB and choose swedish locale there
> and finally pressing apply system-wide and restarting Shotwell.
>

Can you tell me which tab of the Print dialog you're seeing this?  We only
have control over one tab, "Image Settings".  Or do you mean Page Setup?
Again, that's a GTK control.  If you open Firefox (File -> Page Setup) do
you see the same thing?

> * When selecting multiple photos and then opening
> "Photos::Adjust Date&Time" only one photo is shown
> which is a bit confusing. It would be nice if there
> was a visual cue in the UI here that clearly indicated
> that this photo is just the first among the selected
> photos. For example, you could render it as a stack of
> photos where the second photo is showing up partially
> behind the first one.
>

Ticketed: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2138

Thanks for all this great input!  Hopefully some of these will be fixed in
time for 0.6.

-- Jim