Shotwell Photo Viewer should replace EOG as default viewer

[YannUbuntu]

Binary package hint: shotwell

Shotwell Photo Viewer is a component of Shotwell. I suggest to make it the default picture viewer instead of EOG.

Advantages:
- much faster than EOG as viewer
- proposes useful tools for rapid photo editing : red-eye, crop, rotation ...

Disadvantage :
- can't delete a picture (should be solved soon : http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/2231)

May be linked to https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-maverick-shotwell

[Omer Akram (om26er)]

Thank you for your suggestion. However, the changes you are requesting aren't really a bug and require more discussion, which should be done on an appropriate mailing list or forum. http://www.ubuntu.com/support/community/mailinglists might be a good start for determining which mailing list to use.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your suggestion, that has been discussed before but shotwell is a photo viewer not an image one, it doesn't handle images format that eog do

[Adam Dingle (adam-yorba)]

I'll point out that it was never the Shotwell team's intention to develop a program that would replace Eye of GNOME. For the record, here's an excerpt from some thoughts on the subject that I sent to Rick Spencer and Robert Ancell a couple of months ago:

Shotwell was primarily designed to be a photo organizer like, say, iPhoto, Picasa or Aperture. Now, of course, the line between a photo organizer and image viewer is somewhat blurry. The user can invoke Shotwell on a photo file directly, and Shotwell may evolve to gain more image viewer capabilities. But today, here are Eye of GNOME features which the Shotwell viewer does not yet have:

- can open any GNOME-supported image type including GIF, SVG (Shotwell handles only JPEG, PNG and now RAW files)
- transparent pixels are shown as checkerboard pattern (default) or as custom color
- photo strip bar (opened via View->Image Collection) shows thumbnails for all photos in a directory
- File menu shows recently opened photos
- commands to jump to first/last image in current directory
- status bar shows count of images in current directory and current position (e.g. "3 / 11")
- Edit->Move to Trash command
- File->Open With lets me open image in any other installed image application (e.g. Firefox, gThumb, GIMP)
- can display complete metadata for a photo (in Properties->Details)
- customizable toolbar: Edit->Toolbar lets me rearrange toolbar buttons or add new ones
- plugin system with various plugins available (e.g. the eog-plugins package contains plugins for geolocation on a map, slideshow shuffle)
- documentation available in DocBook format, not just a wiki page
- Print->Image Settings lets me specify image position on printed page
- can jump to random image in directory

A user who depends on any of these features today may be unhappy if Eye of GNOME is replaced with Shotwell.

More generally, I personally don't see a pressing need to replace Eye of GNOME; it's a longstanding core GNOME program with a clean user interface. Most other operating systems have separate applications for image viewing and photo editing/management; for example, on the Mac the Preview and iPhoto programs are different.

[YannUbuntu (yannubuntu)]

Thank you for your answers.

I understand your point, but I just want to remark that :
(1) Shotwell Photo Viewer could be default viewer for JPEG/PNG/RAW pictures only, EOG for the rest.
(2) IMHO above EOG features (except Trash, Print and Slideshow) are less important than current drawbacks (slow viewing, no fast editing tools, and Bug #632810)
(3) advanced users who need those advanced features for JPG/PNG can easily set EOG by default for JPG/PNG as EOG is still installed (for other image extensions).

In 10.10 beta, a right-click on a JPEG or PNG proposes to open it with Shotwell Photo Viewer, so current situation is not optimum, but ok to me as user has choice.

Let's talk about this again when Trash, Print and Slideshow are implemented in Shotwell viewer (in 11.04 ?) ;)