[Shotwell] export-Feedback

[Adam Dingle]

Ingo,

it's true that Postr is a useful tool for uploading photos to Flickr, 
and at the moment it's pretty easy to export from Shotwell to Flickr 
using Postr: all you have to do is export photos from Shotwell to a 
folder (e.g. on your desktop), then drag the folder into Postr.  As you 
point out, it might be nice if the user could drag from Shotwell to 
Postr directly.  Unfortunately that might not so easy to implement given 
the intricacies of how drag and drop works in GNOME.  Technical details: 
Postr accepts files dragged from Nautilus, i.e. a set of URLs.  But 
because Shotwell is a non-destructive photo editor, when you begin 
dragging the images to be exported are not yet available as files.  When 
you drag from Shotwell 0.5 to a Nautilus folder, Shotwell builds the 
exported images on the fly and copies them into the destination folder.  
But unfortunately this won't work for dragging into Postr or other 
applications which expect a set of URLs.

We've built exporting to Flickr and other services directly into 
Shotwell for a couple of reasons.  First, as described above it might 
not be so easy to implement drag and drop into other exporting 
applications.  Second, we like having export inside Shotwell because 
over time we may evolve Shotwell to be more deeply integrated with 
photo-hosting services.  At some point we may automatically sync photos 
bidirectionally between Shotwell and hosting sites, so that photos you 
upload to a site through a Web browser will be downloaded into Shotwell 
automatically.  We might also implement background syncing so that you 
can work locally with your photos at full resolution quickly, but photos 
will be automatically synced up to photo services in the background.  
Shotwell's existing integrated export capability is a possible first 
step toward this sort of deeper integration.

It's true that the export services are still hard-coded in Shotwell 0.5: 
we don't yet have plugins.  But we are still planning to implement a 
plugin API in Shotwell at some point; then we'll probably move the 
currently built-in export code into a set of plugins.  See 
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/182 .  Eventually photo service plugins may 
even support bidirectional syncing as described above.

cheers
adam

Ingo Lütkebohle wrote:
> Heya,
>
> I'm wondering a little about the worth of having export functionality
> developed from scratch for Shotwell.
>
> Of course, this is not 0.5 specific but applies to 0.4 too. However, I
> was kind of expecting to see plugin-capability in 0.5, which would have
> made this comment moot. As that did not happen, I'm sending it now.
>
> There are a number of excellent flickr-Tools available. For example, I'm
> using the small-and-to-the-point "postr", but there are several others
> for which the same argument holds.
>
> Such tools already integrate pretty well with Shotwell just using
> out-of-the-box capabilities -- i.e. drag'n'drop -- exporting using dnd
> and postr is at least as fast, if not faster, than the current Shotwell
> support for flickr.
>
> Whats more, postr allows me to specify names, tags and sets for my
> uploads, which Shotwell currently does not do. Last, but not least,
> postr doesn't block Shotwell while uploading.
>
> I would suspect that using the dnd data-exchange mechanism on the
> backend, integration with postr could have been built in a fraction of
> the time it took you to build your own flickr-uploader.
>
> Long mail, short question: Why are you building this functionality again?
>
> Cheers, Ingo
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