[Shotwell] suggestions

[Florin Andrei]

On 05/06/2010 11:48 AM, Adam Dingle wrote:
>
> As you may know, if you already have a set of photos which you've
> organized into a directory hierarchy you like, you can import them into
> Shotwell while preserving the existing hierarchy in place - just use

I keep all my pictures (a decade worth of data, 40k+ pictures, 50+ GB) 
on a webserver, shared with Gallery (I'm right now in the process of 
migrating from G2 to G3, so they are not available externally). But the 
directory structure is 100% hand-crafted, Gallery gives you a lot of 
freedom in that regard.

.
|-- YYYY
|   |-- YYYYMMDD__event1__place1
|   |   |-- P1212312312.JPEG
|   |   |-- P2323232322.JPEG
|   |   YYYYMMDD__event2__place2
|   |   |-- P3453453453.JPEG
|-- YYYY
|   |-- YYYYMMDD__event3__place3
.....
.....
.....

It's basically one album for each year, containing sub-albums for each 
event, containing pictures. A lot of metadata is at the filesystem level 
(names of folders). There may be some custom metadata in EXIF 
(geolocation, etc.) at some point in the future, but not now. There are 
only jaypegs, I don't keep RAW format files (I process them once, then 
delete the original RAW - otherwise I'd waste my whole life just 
tweaking RAW files forever).

That's the "master copy" (there are rsync backup copies too) and it's 
not local. I want to keep it exactly the way it is, to avoid dependency 
on any software or platform or whatever. Also, my laptops and 
workstations are always more or less in flux (I don't even own my 
laptop), while the server is a much more stable environment - hence why 
the master copy is on the server instead of somewhere else.

So now you see why an organizer is useless to me. I'm by no means the 
exception - yet I don't deny the usefulness of an organizer for those 
who prefer a different workflow. Horses for courses, to each their own.

But a viewer with some decent tweaking capabilities is always welcome, 
no matter who you are. Linux is kind of lacking in this department. 
There's Picasa (which is pretty weak) and that's pretty much it. 
Shotwell with the Adjust button was a pleasant surprise.

> Regarding using Shotwell as a viewer, I'm not sure exactly what you're
> looking for here

This:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/29966/gthumb-4-shotwell.png

Or Picasa.

Allow me to do Prev / Next through a folder while keeping an eye on the 
thumbnails of the pictures nearby, while I'm making quick adjustments to 
those photos which require it.

Thumbnails are invaluable when there are 6 copies of nearly the same 
shot, I need to keep 1 and delete 5. With thumbnails, I can make 
decisions so much more quickly.

My point is - I have a life, I can't spend all my time processing 
pictures. So I have to find ways to accelerate processing as much as 
possible, while keeping the quality of the end result in the green zone.

I download the pictures from the camera, process them in one shot (trim 
the repeats, develop RAW if they were made with the big camera, tweak 
exposure/temp/tint/etc if necessary, run them through the denoiser in 
batch mode, save as JPEG, upload to server, done). If it takes more than 
30 min total (from sit down to stand up) for a 120 pic batch (of which 
there may be 30 keepers or so), it means I wasted my time.

> 2. We're also considering adding a file tree to the sidebar which would
> allow you to browse through all photos which have been imported into
> Shotwell according to their containing directories - this is
> http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1594 .

I'll take both - tree and thumbnails. :) See screenshot above. Show the 
tree in a tiny rectangle, and the thumbnails for the current folder in a 
bigger rectangle. They can both be stacked in a narrow column on either 
the left or the right side, there's plenty of 16:9 monitors nowadays. Or 
see Picasa for a different layout. Whatever works.

gThumb gives the user a lot of freedom to choose the GUI layout. But 
then there's the problem of the default layout, which is not trivial 
(gThumb makes bad default choices IMO, Picasa is better with the 
default, but I like gThumb better after I change it).

User interfaces are complicated. :-(

-- 
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/