Re: just my 2 cents

Hello Claudio,

As I originally added the jhead support ("InsertExif" option), I would 
like to comment on a few your issues, which are all very relevant.

Claudio Piciarelli wrote:

>First of all a bug report: InsertExif=1 doesn't work if the thumbnails are
>stored in the thumbs/ directory.
>  
>
>It all works fine if the thumb directory isn't used. Seems like the
>$relURL passed to jhead isn't always correct.
>  
>
Sounds like a bug as you say. I will look into it and pass a patch to 
Carlos.

>Now some advices about things that, in my opinion, should be better handled:
>
>* InsertExif should insert Exif info only in the page with the original
>image. The scaled down versions (obtained specifying different resolutions
>with SlidePictureGeometry) don't have exif headers, so the jhead output
>contains only generic informations (file name, size, mtime, resolution). But
>these are quite useless, if a user specifies InsertExif he wants info about
>the camera settings and so on, not info about the file.
>
I always use the InsertExif with the UseMogrify option (requires 
ImageMagick to be installed). Using that option, the exif data will be 
preserved even in the scaled down versions. As you point out later, 
people tend to browse only the scaled down versions, so I think it would 
be a pity to leave the data out for these.

>* about the time displayed with DisplayFileDate. If the InsertExif option is
>used, cthumb displays the time and date taken from the exif info, otherwise
>it uses the mtime of the file. Personally I don't like this, the exif time
>and the file time are two totally different concepts, so they sholudn't be
>confused. For example if I rotate a picture with jpegtran (great tool!) the
>file time changes, but the exif time doesn't. It would be nice if the user
>could choose if the displayed time is the one taken from the file info or
>from the exif info. In the second case, it should be displayed the exif time
>even if the user specifies InsertExif=0 ("I don't want full exif
>informations, but I want the exif time"... this isn't possible with the
>current version of cthumb).
>
Certainly a nice to have to differentiate between exif time and file 
time. When browsing a photo album though, I would personally always 
prefer the time of the photo (.i.e. the exif time).

>* again on exif infos :). What about using the locale time format even for
>the time extracted from exif infos? It should be quite easy to write a
>parser that extracts the correct strftime parameters IF jhead output it's
>always in the same format. I don't know if the time format displayed by
>jhead depends or not from how the time is stored inside the exif header.
>Unfortunately I think that date and times are stored in the header as
>strings, so their format is probably camera-dependent...
>  
>
You said it...

>
>Time for usability considerations:
>* In my photo albums I use three versions for each picture: the original
>one, a scaled-down (800x600) one and the thumbnails. Generally people don't
>look the original pictures since they're too big and don't fit in the
>screen, so they look at the scaled down version. But the people want to
>1) quickly browse the images through the next/prev arrows 2) immediately see
>the full picture, without needing to move the mouse away from "next" arrow to
>scroll down the page and see the bottom half of the picture. This is
>difficult to achieve since cthumb "wastes" a lot of space in the top of the
>page. I have solved this problem
>- removing the album name in the "up" link, I think the up arrow 
>  is sufficient
>- moving the time, the caption and the story BELOW the picture.
>I now use this layout, from top to bottom:
>-prev/up/next arrows (without album title)
>-the picture
>-the different resolutions links
>-picture caption
>-picture date and time
>-story
>-exif info
>  
>
This feature would be fantastic. I have wished for that for a long time, 
but never got around to do it myself. Did you already implement this in 
cthumb? If so, maybe you could send the patch to Carlos.

Cheers,

Christian.




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