[Thunar-dev] Thumbnails

[Brian J. Tarricone]

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Erik Harrison wrote:
> On 6/30/05, Biju Chacko <botsie at xfce.org> wrote:
> 
>>Benedikt Meurer wrote:
>>
>>>This would be that we need to remember the chosen view per directory. We
>>>can do that, no problem, just the question: Should we actually do it
>>>that way?
>>
>>Absolutely not. Not unless we are providing a spatial mode in which all
>>sorts of folder-specific settings are saved.
> 
> I think that view saving is very useful, but I suspect you are right.
> Down that path lies hybrid spatial-navigational madness.

Why is it madness?  People need to stop thinking of navigaional and
spatial as two examples of "the one true way".  There's nothing that
says you can't mix concepts of the two.  Whether we like it or not,
Windows Explorer (in its current incarnation) has been around for a
decade: it's successful, millions of people use it, and, frankly, it's
the only GUI file manager that I can use without becoming annoyed and
frustrated[1].  Its handling of per-directory state isn't perfect, and I
think we can build on that and make something better and more intuitive.

> Windows XP's basic thumbnail view really just seems like the pretty
> standard thumbnail view of other file managers, just with large
> thumbnails and spacing.

Maybe so, but that's not a view that's appropriate for normal file browsing.

> I would argue that this is just the basic thunar icon view with
> thumbnailing turned on.

But it's not, as you said: larger thumbnails and spacing.

> I would just make thumbnailing optional, put
> it in the icon view, and provide a toolbar button for those who need
> to alternate.

That sounds like UI clutter to me.

> People who would really make use of it keep all their images in a
> single folder anyway, so leaving it on most of the time is only a
> small performance hit (hopefully, since there are no thumnailable
> objects in other folders),

I don't think I agree with this.  Yes, I do have dedicated image folders
for photos, but I do have various other image files (not necessarily
photos) scattered over other places, especially in my homedir and it's
subdirectories.

> or a small click overhead (one click when
> decending into their ~/images folder, for example).

Again, a toolbar button for this seems like UI clutter to me.

> My opinion at any rate. I'd like to see harder numbers on the
> thumbnail performance before we decide.

Yeah, numbers would be useful.  It's silly to try to optimise something
that may not even need it...

	-brian

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