Sebastian,

thanks for trying out Shotwell and sending us your detailed comments.

On 08/11/2010 05:41 AM, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> Hi all, I just tested the latest release on my 8k photo set and worked
> for 8 hours with shotwell. Propably a lot has already changed since
> then, but anyway here is my feedback:
>
> First the ugly:
>
> - Importing from a Ubuntu-mounted Windows share does not work I then
>    tried to import from ~/.gvfs/blabla which imported about 3k photos or
>    so before shotwell simply crashed (repeatedly). Copying the share to
>    my desktop and importing from a local folder worked fine though.
>    

You say that importing from a mounted Windows share "does not work" - 
what do you mean by this?  When you try to import from the share, does 
Shotwell display an error or simply ignore the files?  Were you 
attempting to link or copy the photos into Shotwell?  I just tried to 
reproduce this by importing photos from a Windows share into Shotwell 
0.6.1 on my machine, and it worked fine for me.

It sounds like you're able to reproduce the crash you're seeing when 
importing from ~/.gvfs/foo.  We'd love to see a backtrace for this.  
Ideally you could build Shotwell from trunk, run it from gdb, import 
from ~/.gvfs/foo and then send us the backtrace generated upon crashing 
(assuming that the crash still occurs in trunk).  If you want to do this 
and need any extra information about how to proceed then just let us know.

> - Some of my images were undated, although shotwell had imported them
>    into folders that made sense (2005/07/15/foo.jpg) etc. Is that due to
>    a lack of exiv information? I can debug the specific photo files in
>    question.
>    

Yes - if there is no EXIV information then Shotwell will have treat the 
image as undated.  Some users would like us to use the photo's file time 
as the image date instead in that case; we're currently undecided about 
whether to make that change since we think file times may not always be 
relevant or useful.

> - The worst thing overall, is that I was not able to find those undated
>    photos in my list, as I worked along my events and it does not seem to be
>    possible to filter photos that are not assigned to an event. Am I
>    right that this would be: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1632?  (always
>    place Undated folder at bottom of event list)
>
>    In general it would be great to be able to search for undated photos
>    and/or photos that are not assigned to any one event. I nearly
>    overlooked a couple of events (like my marriage) because those photos
>    never showed up under any "event".
>    

You're right that it's a major limitation that you can't currently find 
undated photos and/or photos which belong to no event, and we hope to 
fix this soon.  As Jan-Christoph pointed out, the ticket 
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1712 is tracking this issue, more or less.

By the way, Shotwell does currently include an Undated folder (mentioned 
in http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1632) but that's not quite what you're 
looking for.  The Undated folder contains all events which Shotwell 
can't place under any year in the sidebar tree because those events 
contain only undated photos.  Currently Shotwell does not place undated 
photos into any event at import time, but you can still place them into 
events manually, at which time those events will be in the Undated folder.

> - Adding a tag over multiple photos works fine, but modifying does
>    not. This hurt when I discovered I had mistyped a tag and wanted to
>    mass-rename a tag. I know that some mp3 taggers show all common tags
>    if you select multiple and allow you to mass-rename common tags among
>    files. This would have helped me.
>    

I assume that you realize that you can right click any tag in the 
sidebar and choose the Rename command to rename it.  It's true that 
Shotwell doesn't let you rename a tag only in a selected set of photos, 
however.

> - Tag autocompletion please :)
>    (http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1334). Typing the name of my son over
>    and over again was tiresome and very prone to typos.
>    

Yes - we want this too.  :)

> - I ended up with quite many tags. If I had a simple search bar that
>    dynamically reduced the list of tags to those potentially matching
>    that would help me find appropriate tags more easily. I guess that is
>    different from the more generic issue: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/80
>    (Search box) which would also be helpful. (Find all images of my son
>    in 2009 etc)
>    

We are hoping to implement an all-in-one search box which lets you 
search by tag, title, filename and so on.  The design of the search box 
is still up for discussion, but probably you'll be able to simply type a 
string to perform a search over all fields, or to select a particular 
search type.  If you select a search by tag, it would be nice if the 
search box would autocomplete tag names.  I'm not quite sure whether 
this is what you mean by "a search bar that dynamically reduced the list 
of tags to those potentially matching", though.

> - A couple times I had clicked on an image in the viewer and the arrow
>    keys would move the image around rather than navigating the image
>    collection. Call me stupid but I had a hard time finding where I had
>    to click to get back to the navigating. Not sure what could be done
>    about this if at all.
>    

If you got into a mode where the arrow keys move the image around, then 
you must have zoomed into the image slightly, either by using the mouse 
scroll wheel or by dragging the zoom slider at the bottom of the image.  
You can get back to the navigating mode simply by zooming back out, e.g. 
by using the scroll wheel.

> - I had a couple of crashes (3 or so) at seemingly random points.
>    

Again, if you could get us backtraces for these we'd be eternally 
grateful.  :)

> - I would love to have a script that exports the events and hashes of my
>    image library, so I can import the same events to a different computer
>    which contains the same images. That would probably not be part of
>    shotwell proper, but would help me to transfer the work I did on the
>    train on my laptop to my main media workstation. Is there something
>    like this already?
>    

Not as such.  It's a longer-term goal of Shotwell to allow easy photo 
sharing across both local networks and the Internet, but we're not there 
yet.  See http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1292 .

> The beautiful (shorter list, but I am overall very positive :)):
>    

Thanks for the positive feedback - it's always nice to see this too!  :)

> ...
>
> - Importing added tags for those tags that I had added via gthumb to the
>    photos previously. WOnderful! For the same reasons, I'd love shotwell
>    to add the tags directly to the exiv headers of my originals so the
>    work is not lost when I move to the next photo app ;-).
>    

Right.  Shotwell *will* add those tags when you export photos using the 
File->Export command.  We're also thinking of storing those tags into 
photo files on the fly, as many users have requested - this is 
http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1290 .

adam

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