Image viewer applications

[Bastien Nocera]

Hey,

----- Original Message -----
> Hi all,
> 
> In Fedora 20, Shotwell was the default image viewer and no other image
> viewer was installed.  In F21 Shotwell is still the default, but now
> Image Viewer (eog) is installed as well. This doesn't make any sense
> since Image Viewer serves no purpose unless it's the default image
> handler, whereas Shotwell is more useful for previewing and organizing a
> collection of photos.
> 
> We've also recently noticed that gthumb looks like a nice alternative to
> Shotwell. I propose we do one of the following:
> 
> * Replace Shotwell with gthumb, and remove Image Viewer.
> * Replace Shotwell with gthumb, but keep Image Viewer as the default
> image viewer.
> * Remove Shotwell, and keep Image Viewer as the only image viewer.
> 
> Opinions welcome.
> 
> You might notice that I'm gunning for Shotwell here. It looks a lot
> older than gthumb, and seems to have mostly the same functionality.
> (Make sure to check out gthumb in F21, not F20. You wouldn't know they
> were the same app due to the huge changes.) Image Viewer, in contrast,
> is a simple app for just previewing images, which is a different
> purpose, but I think gthumb can also serve this purpose just as well
> while looking nicer.
> 
> There are other options, of course, which I am less fond of:
> 
> * Remove Image Viewer. (Shotwell remains.)
> * Make Image Viewer the default image viewer. (Shotwell remains.)
> 
> Either of these would be more sensible than keeping Image Viewer if it
> is not the default image viewer.
> 
> GNOME Photos is notably not one of the apps we're considering. We've
> been told it's not ready yet.

A couple of things:
- We used shotwell's viewer, not shotwell by default. It's a different mode of
  the same binary, but it's not shotwell itself.
- eog was already installed by default when we added Shotwell to F16, and shotwell
  was made the default for the image types it handled

So my questions would be:
- Is gnome-photos going to have a "display/preview" mode, that doesn't import in the
  library? Something that's fast enough to launch for multiple images? Can we yield on
  that?
- Is gnome-documents going to get similar support for opening PDFs/etc. without opening them
  (but giving the opportunity to add them to the "library")?
- Should we remove evince from the default installation then?

Personally, I'd keep it as-is for now, and remove both Shotwell (and its viewer) and eog from
the default installation once gnome-photos can be installed by default.

The core applications we ship don't need to be the most complete ones (I know that vlc has more features
than Videos, or evince than gnome-documents), but they need to cover the 90% of usage.

Cheers