Comment 5 for bug 252664

Filippo's comment #4 is an excellent description of the technical issues involved in trying to do a "real-time" webcam resolution switch when taking a photo. In fact, some test code I wrote a while back to do just this resulted in just over 5 seconds from the time the "Take a Photo" button was pressed to the point that the reduced-resolution "viewfinder" image was restored. Note that for the entire duration of the process no viewfinder image was available. The result was a completely unacceptable user experience.

The good news is that this problem can be easily worked around in current versions of Cheese by simply setting the default webcam resolution to a lower setting as desired via the Preferences dialog. This allows the user to make the tradeoff between optimal viewfinder performance and photo resolution.