Image viewer applications

[drago01]

On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 4:27 PM, Bastien Nocera <bnocera at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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")?

Does it support opening multiple documents at once?

> - Should we remove evince from the default installation then?

Not unless documents is usable for multi page documents (See
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=710043 and
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689041)

But that aside I don't think using a "management app" for simple
viewing is a good idea unless it has a preview mode that does not have
all the "bloat" (i.e what you wrote above).