Re: [Solang-users] Initial feedback

[Debarshi Ray]

> I imported 880 photos to get a feeling of the application. And so far
> Solang has kept its promises; browsing through my collection is
> extremely fast.

Thanks!

> So I would like to congratulate the developers for their amazing work,
> and I will be following the project closely !

Recently we have been discussing changing our backend from a
Solang-specifc SQLite DB to the desktop-wide application agnostic
Tracker DB. We are still exploring the idea, which means no code has
been written apart from some prototyping; and Tracker 0.7.x is still
not going to be shipped by distributions sometime within the next few
weeks. But lets see how that will help us.

> Here are some comments/ideas/bugs:
>
>
> - The import was nice and fast enough, I found the import dialog quite
> functional; the progress window is a bit terse, it just displays a
> count, and it would be nice to have a thumbnail of the currently
> imported photo, a file name etc...

(Honestly our importer is not as fast as that of some other programs.
The reason being that we actually create the thumbnails instead of
using the comparitively low-quality one embedded within the Exif data.
However, we can always provide a switch to alternate between the two
choices.)

But we would not be needing importers anymore. With Tracker we can
just query it to give us all the photos on the system. It is upto the
user to configure Tracker to index data from various sources -- local
folders, Flickr accounts, etc.. So if you already have a large
collection of photos, chances are that Tracker has already indexed it
and there is no need to separately import it into Solang.

> - f-spot stores the tags in the Exif tags which is quite nice since I
> can reimport the photos in a different software and keep my tags -
> Solang does not seem to support this;

Even better. Tracker has tags. So you can use a Nautilus extension to
tag your files (not just photos) and then search for files (using
tracker-search-tool) using them, and obviously access them from Solang
once it uses Tracker. So your tags become valid across the desktop.

> - I did not find any way to set the preferences (the folder where my
> photos are stored - this is necessary if I import pics from my camera as
> I would like to store them on my USB drive - there isn't enough space on
> my netbook)

I am not very sure about how Tracker deals with removable media, but
should be solvable.

> - Solang is missing thumbnails for every non JPG pic in my collection.
> But if I open the image I can actually see it.

Ok.

> - Solang does not seem to support the Exif orientation tag, so all my
> portrait pictures has thumbnails with the wrong orientation.

Ok.

> - I can't see the name/folder of the files in Solang this would be nice
> to have in the properties tab.

Ok.

> - The minimum height of the window is 600 pixels which is a bit too much
> on a Netbook with a 1024x600 resolution, can it be set a bit smaller ?

Yes, I have seen it.

> - Some file management features would be nice to have - ie: I looked for
> a delete function, but it seems there is no way to delete a photo from
> the collection right now.

True.

> - It would be nice to be able to add tag to pictures by right clicking
> them (just like in f-spot). The filtering only allows to include a tag,
> it would be nice to be able to exclude it as well as have some set
> operations (and/or).

Should be easy to implement.

> - The editor does not work (screen is gray) so I was not able to try it.

Umm... I am not sure what you mean here.

> - Solang crashes if pictures are deleted on disk.

This is a known problem.




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