[Shotwell] Some Ideas of mine

[Bengt Thuree]

Just want to second these ideas...
If Shotwell manage to get these before 10.10 :) :)

The main one I found lacking is tagging (normal, geo-tagging, location
tagging), and rating. Face recognition would be great as well, but this
is not a trivial thing.

Hopefully I will be able to help with some of these, as well as all
other features of Shotwell... at least I will be able to help out with
testing for sure...

Cheers

Bengt

On Fri, 2010-05-14 at 03:06 -0400, Kenneth Jernigan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've been playing with Shotwell for a few days and looking over the
> backend/code structure in my spare time.  I hope to be able to take some
> time to experiment with the Vala programming language and perhaps toy with
> some of these ideas I have.  However, I felt it best to share them and let
> the masses decide if my idea(s) are worth the time I spent typing...  Thus,
> I send the following ideas:
> 
> 1.)  The undo feature is great - however, I notice it's only for the current
> session and is lost following a restart of the application.  However, I
> noticed that in the database, all of the transforms are kept there.  Thus,
> my first thought is that Shotwell should be able to undo ANY transform at
> ANY time (This could also allow re-arrange of the transforms without needing
> to redo them).  An example... if I've taken time to perform a Red-Eye
> removal and performed an Enhance and then later decide to "un-enhance" the
> photo, I must now spend time re-performing the Red-Eye.  (A "history" could
> be added to the Side Bar)
> 
> 2.)  The first thought led me to my second thought.   The layout of the
> transforms in the database appear to me like they might be un-optimized.
>  I'm not sure on all of the timing of Shotwell (mostly due to my lack of
> knowledge of the code -- still learning), however, it would seem to me that
> using text string processing would be using resources and limit the
> reasonable growth of the database. I would think, instead, that a separate
> table of transforms would be stored, capturing a different transform in each
> table entry.  Then, the photo table would have a list of associated
> transform keys (in order).   While the transform parameters in the table
> would still be text, the amount of text parsing could be reduced, or even
> offloaded into the transform function.  I could even see this opening the
> door for plug-in style transform updates. However, I do not know the time
> the SQL database takes to query compared with string parsing, but I know
> database queries are already performed to read the Tags and  Events, so I
> assume not too much time is lost.
> 
> 3.)  Specifically, I miss a few types of transforms:
> 
>    - the ability to create a sepia or B/W photo. I know this can
>    be achieved with careful manipulation of the Adjust sliders, but predefined
>    filters will improve user performance.
>    - Soft Focus feature - great for hiding complexions and creating affects
>    - Rotate (straighten) -- I saw a ticket for this already.
>    - Sharpen -- sometimes photos come too soft/blurred.  It'd be nice to fix
>    without loading GIMP.
>    - Faded borders -- one of my wife's favorites features when prepping a
>    photo for print.
>    - Flip -- rotate 180 + mirror.
> 
> 
> 4.)  A struggle I've had with Shotwell is it's lack of multiple
> keyboard/mouse inputs.  I will list here the keyboard/layout/mouse gestures
> I keep trying to use but can't:
> 
>    - When I've zoomed to a picture, I expect my scroll wheel to move me to
>    the next -- but no luck.
>    - When I press backspace from a picture page, I expect to return to the
>    Photos page (legacy effect of internet explorer).  Same is true for my
>    mouse's browser back button.
>    - When I have a red-eye tool on the screen, I try to get precise
>    placement control with the arrow keys -- doesn't work.
>    - I wish that the mirror, adjust date/time, and favorites where
>    accessible without needing to click Photo first
>    - I wish Extended Information wasn't a modal dialog, but instead a
>    replacement/supplement for the Basic Information frame in the sidebar
>    - When on the photo checkerboard page, I want CTRL + Mouse Wheel to
>    adjust the zoom.
>    - When looking at a photo - it'd be nice to have the option to zoom in
>    without needing to crop the image, make window bigger, etc. (I understand
>    optimization with libjpeg probably makes this difficult)
>    - When adjusting crop, It would be nice if the CTRL + crop option worked
>    similar to several other image editing apps (maintain current selections
>    aspect ratio).
>    - When looking at a photo, it feels as though there is a missing up arrow
>    by the left/right arrows (to return to checkerboard page)
> 
> 5.)  It would be a nice feature to have captions for each picture that
> automatically upload to Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, etc, when the pictures are
> published.  I believe this could easily be stored as a text field in the
> Photos Table.
> 
> 6.)  Support for multiple users.  I have setup a single database shared (via
> links from the hidden folder to a shared folder with a user group to which
> all users have R/W access) between multiple logins (could be multiple PCs).
>  I like to share the images, otherwise when she imports the pictures, I have
> to re-link them into my database to see them. However, with this setup, I'm
> cautious not to have both users access the database simultaneously.  It
> would be ideal if Shotwell could handle this situation automatically with an
> option for shared database (/usr/share/shotwell/.shotwell/*) or individual
> database (~/.shotwell/*).
> 
> 
> For now, I have no other thoughts.  However, I will continue to play with
> the code, time permitting, and continue using Shotwell.  I'm glad to see
> that Shotwell is due to become the default photo handler in Ubuntu 10.10.  I
> appologize if I've rambled - just consider these the thoughts of a humble
> embedded software engineer...
> 
> Good night,
> Ken
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