Re: KuickShow for KDE 2.1

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Re: KuickShow for KDE 2.1
by raindog on Friday 16/Mar/2001, @13:09

For me, a main focus of any image management program imust be the ability to manage (do things to) large numbers of pictures at once. I almost never use thumbnails because they consume too much space in the file list widget without providing enough detail to tell me whether I want to include a photo in a selection (to move, delete, whatever.)

A preview isn't necessarily just a "medium-sized preview"; it's the real picture, shrunk if necessary to fit into the preview pane (which in my case is usually about 640x480.) The benefit, though, is that you can see the pictures, often at full resolution, while extending a selection.

So rather than having to go down-enter-look-^W a bunch of times and then remember where I wanted the selection to start, I can just go shift-down until I find a picture I don't want to include in the selection, then press shift-up and then the hot key for delete, move or whatever. It makes management of large image collections MUCH easier.

Mind you, no X11 image browser that I'm aware of will do this currently. I had high hopes for both Konqueror/pixie and Nautilus to provide this sort of functionality, but neither to date has done so.

I wrote a simple patch for GQView, a C/gtk image browser (http://gqview.sourceforge.net) to provide this sort of functionality -- it has a "preview pane" which makes up the bulk of the interface, but selecting via the keyboard in the official version doesn't update the preview pane -- but my two patch submissions were never acknowledged. If anyone has used gqview and would like my patch, I'll gladly email it. I'd be happy to help out with KuickShow in this regard, but (so far) I am allergic to C++.

I've also written a program in perl/ImageMagick to find images that look like duplicates, and wanted to port it to C/Imlib some time ago but the documentation for Imlib seemed to be nonexistent. I think that's another important part of image management and something that (last I knew) ACDSee doesn't even provide. If you're ever interested in adding that kind of thing to Kuickshow and have trouble figuring out my lame algorithm, drop me a line.

But anyway, that's why I think a preview pane is more important than even thumbnails in an image management app.

Rob

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