image description / title should be visible via shotwell viewer

[Neal McBurnett]

When I run from the command line

    shotwell /tmp/river-300x224_a.jpg

or when an image is viewed in shotwell via the nautilus file manager,
there is no way to see the description of the image (EXIF "Description" tag). I can only get a tiny bit of other metadata, e.g. via menu Photo/Adjust date and time.

Going to the help via F1 and searching for the standard EXIF name: Description, yields "No matching help pages found in “Shotwell”." Eventually I found that I should search for "Title", which told me:

  The View ▸ Titles checkbox toggles the display of titles beneath each photo. By default, a photo's title is its filename.
  To change a photo's title, select the photo and click Photos ▸ Edit Title, or press F2.

But there is no View / Titles entry in the menu. A web search finally led me to the explanation on askubuntu:

    http://askubuntu.com/questions/312867/how-to-add-metadata-to-images-using-shotwell

Which says viewing the description is only available in "Shotwell itself", not in 'Shotwell photo viewer'. I had no idea that I was not using shotwell itself or that there were these different interfaces to the same software.

Viewing descriptions / titles should be provided in the viewer also. As described by the Library of Congress at

  Adding Descriptions to Digital Photos
   http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/10/mission-possible-an-easy-way-to-add-descriptions-to-digital-photos/

it is a really important, basic feature to see and add a description to a photo. Photos without descriptions are missing critical information that should be easily available to users of the image, and it should be easy to change. At the least, the menu item should appear and be grayed out, and this should be explained in the documentation. It is very confusing to have the documentation list an option which isn't there.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: shotwell 0.12.3-0ubuntu0.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-72.107-generic 3.2.64
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-72-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu17.8
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Nov 17 08:26:00 2014
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=screen
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: shotwell
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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