[Digikam-devel] [Bug 152400] New: Wish: Simple virtual resize and crop tool

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152400         
           Summary: Wish: Simple virtual resize and crop tool
           Product: digikamimageplugins
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Debian stable
        OS/Version: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: wishlist
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
        AssignedTo: digikam-devel kde org
        ReportedBy: kjetil kjernsmo net


Version:            (using KDE KDE 3.5.5)
Installed from:    Debian stable Packages
OS:                Linux

While Bug #149485 has a totally awesome way of resizing images on the fly, what I want is far simpler, it would be nice to have a simple box that you move across the image, when you click, the corners are saved, and the image is scaled and resized on the fly to fit the display medium.

The use case is this:
I do some slideshows, but often on widely different display screens, sometimes on my 1600x1200 screen, sometimes on the 1280x800 laptop, sometimes on a 1280x1024 beamer and now I've just bought a 1920x1080 LCD for the living room. All these have a far smaller resolution than the pictures I shoot though, and in many cases just scaling the image is not what you want. I never use the digital zoom of my camera, because I keep telling myself that it is better to crop away the irrelevant stuff when I get home, but I end up never doing it, because cropping means loosing information too.

So, it would have been much better to just store several bounding boxes, that are applied on the fly to the image depending on the display medium. Furthermore, it would be nice to store aspect ratios, in many cases, you would take most of the image, and use the same box for e.g. 1600x1200 and 1280x1024, etc. So, an idea of inheritance would be great, use the right aspect ratio unless a box for exactly the resolution exists. 

I think it would be nice to have this for thumbnail generation too, often downscaled thumbnails of images aren't recognizable.

In the UI, one should be able to set which box you're using, since if the box is totally freenhand, it is much more difficult to get exactly right. 

Actually, I've seen this implemented using JavaScript on some website, but I can't remember where....