Always showing "Open Shotwell" button for SD Card storage can be harmful

[Mario Vukelic]

In bug #771757, the following is reported:

"Using an Android device, Shotwell scans the entire directory for pictures. It also picks up pictures used by apps. Whereas it should only pick up pictures taken by the camera and sent by bluetooth.
(...)
As it is right now, Shotwell can pick up and remove pictures from the device which damage or make unusable applications on the phone. Requiring a reinstall of the application."

Nautilus always shows the "Open Shotwell" button for such storage. Currently this leads to the problem because of Shotwell's behavior.

However, even when this is fixed in gPhoto/Shotwell, the question remains whether it is the right choice for Nautilus to assume that any inserted SD Card containing images must be suitable for viewing/including in Shotwell. As we can see from bug #771757, this is increasingly questionable with the increase of Android devices and similar.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: nautilus 1:3.1.92-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-11.18-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-11-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia wl
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Sep 27 07:50:25 2011
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64+mac (20110422)
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-08-18 (39 days ago)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, do you have a better suggestion for guessing if a device containing photos should offer the option to run the photo viewer or not?

The issue there is really a bug in other part of the stack including android itself, it seems weird to try to workaround it in nautilus.

Note that nautilus doesn't do any action by default, it just expose a launcher than you could access easily by other ways, hidding it would just workaround the issue

[Mario Vukelic (kreuzsakra)]

Thanks for the quick reply. I agree that working around the problem in Nautilus would be awkward.

In comment #2 of the Shotwell bug #771757 there is some background info taken from the upstream reports (and links to those reports). It seems that the problem really is in gPhoto and Android. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shotwell/+bug/771757/comments/2

As per the upstream Shotwell bug, the Shotwell guys believe that the right place to fix it would be gPhoto, and hope that this will happen (though there was some reluctance initially). If this is fixed in gPhoto, Shotwell would behave automatically correct if it is autolaunched for an SD card with images, if I read that right. (Though don't know what would happen when the card has no or a nonstandard camera folder).

I suppose this would then also reduce the problem for Nautilus: Nautilus could still show the button, but clicking it would make Shotwell display only photos from the correct camera folder. Thus the danger of damaging the data on the card is reduced.

I suppose the question then would just be when to show the button, and I don't know how Nautilus does that now - though it seems that it's weird how it currently offers the button for SD cards but not for USB sticks with images. My impression is that this is based on historic accidents (SD cards initially being mainly used in cameras) and is not reliable anymore for non-expert users.

However, in bug #771757 Jim Nelson also says that if gPhoto does not fix it, Shotwell will have to implement a workaround - and may do so by having a configurable camera directory. In this case, Nautilus will have to do something about it as well. Maybe it can know if Shotwell's camera directory was already configured, and in this case show the Shotwell button anyway. But if Shotwell is not configured, it may show an explanation and offer an eog button or some other image viewer without destructive options?

I know nothing of the internals of either application, and therefore I'm mostly speaking from user perspective only.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

> though it seems that it's weird how it currently offers the button for SD cards but not for USB sticks with images.

the detection GNOME is doing is done on the content of the device, if it find folders like "dcim" or "pictures" it will list it as containing photos since most cameras structure their storage this way

[Dylan McCall (dylanmccall)]

Shotwell's behaviour of showing images from all over the card is a bug in Shotwell, being tracked over here:

http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/1903

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.