[Shotwell] Call for testing

[Adam Dingle]

On 06/17/2010 02:35 PM, Martin Olsson wrote:
> On 06/17/2010 01:31 AM, Jim Nelson wrote:
>    
>>> * 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.
>>      
> The note about the color of the padding was just an extra not,
> the bug is about Shotwell using "scale to width" rather than adding
> padding. Or did you mean that there was an existing ticket for
> the "scale to width" issue? If so what was the bug no (I can't find it).
>
> For example if you download and import this photo and use set as desktop
> background, then Shotwell crops the _ball_ out of a basket ball image:
> http://www.pe.com/imagesdaily/2008/04-24/lakers24dwba_300.jpg
>
> Well, to get the buggy effect I guess you need to have "Style == Scale"
> set under System::Preferences::Appearence (this is the default setting
> for Ubuntu 10.04). So actually, I think what needs to happen is that
> when you set the desktop background itself you also need to set the
> "style" option and the "solid background color" in the GNOME Appearance
> dialog as well (you can probably not get away with just adding the
> padding as extra black pixels in the image because then it will look
> bad if the user changes resolution so setting the solid bgcolor to
> black is more versatile).
>    

Martin,

a few points here.  First, we actually made no change from 0.5 to 0.6 in 
the code that sets the desktop background.  I believe that the default 
desktop background style in Ubuntu 10.04 is actually Zoom, not Scale.  
To see this, create a new user, log in as that user and open 
System->Preferences->Appearance.  The style for all of the predefined 
background images will be Zoom.  (Note that GNOME actually tracks the 
style for each background image separately.)

When you set the desktop background from Shotwell, we attempt to set the 
display style for the background image to Zoom.  We realize that this 
might not be the right choice for every photo and user, but it does seem 
to be the GNOME default.  The user can always change the display style 
in System->Preferences->Appearance.  We've thought about having Shotwell 
prompt the user for a display style when setting a background image, but 
are unsure about whether about that might be more annoying than useful.

Finally, I've just realized that we actually have a bug in which 
Shotwell is not always successful in setting the background style to 
Zoom; see http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2172 .  Perhaps you were hit by 
this and were thereby led to believe that we had made some change to our 
background setting functionality in this release.

adam