[KPhotoAlbum] Thumbnail latency

[Joe]

  On 08/25/2010 02:29 PM, Tero Tilus wrote:
> Joe, 2010-08-25 20:04:
>> On 08/21/2010 03:29 AM, Jesper K. Pedersen wrote:
>>> Are you referring to the box you see when you uses Settings->show
>>> tooltips in thumbnail window?
>> Yes.
>>
>> I need to scan through a lot of photos picking a selection for an
>> album (by tagging them).  Hovering to get a larger image helps me
>> make selections if it doesn't work too fast.  I can keep the
>> originals small and see many more per screen.
> That's exactly what I use that hover feature for.  You can easily turn
> it off for a while when you don't necessarily need it.  C-t iirc.
>
Cntrl-T is helpful, but doesn't solve the problem.

The problem is that I need to turn it on and leave it on for relatively 
long sessions when I am selecting/searching through pictures, but when 
it is turned on, it is almost completely unusable because I get a 
preview for every image I move the mouse over while I'm trying to get 
from one image I'm looking at to the next one of interest. This is 
*extremely* disorienting and distracting! It even makes it hard to find 
the next image of interest because it may be covered up by a preview of 
an image that just happened to be "in the way". (and it took quite some 
effort to describe it politely like that!)

dolphin (the file browser - and konqueror too) has this same feature, 
but only displays previews for objects that the mouse has "lingered" on 
for some time (I'm guessing - around 200ms or so). That way, if you move 
the mouse normally, you see a preview for the object you started on and, 
next, a preview for the object you stopped on without everything in 
between that you are essentially just trying to get past.

The point is that adding a (hopefully) tiny modification to the preview 
code that says something like "ignore a mouseover event if lasts less 
than 200ms" should completely fix this issue and make kpa behave the way 
other successful applications do.

It's *little* things like this that make or break a gui!

Another one that's similar, but far less severe (and probably more of a 
user preference issue), is the way that drag and drop works. In kpa, 
dragging and dropping a set of selected images causes all the images to 
move across the screen. This is very dramatic (and cool the first time 
you see it), but I find it ultimately very distracting. The way dolphin 
handles this is to modify the mouse cursor so you know a drag and drop 
is in progress. It doesn't look like what you're doing is ripping your 
data/display apart - and it doesn't rivet your attention on the object 
you're manipulating when it should be focused on the destination you're 
trying to get to.

Joe