[Digikam-devel] Crop in IE

[Andi Clemens]

Sure, I was not going to simply remove things :D
Users have to be asked. BUT: I really don't think the normal crop is really 
useful.
digiKam is for photos, and photos have some defined dimension.
When I sent them to a print service, I need them either to be 3:2 or 4:3.
Sure I can have 1:1 or some manual ratio, but this is rather uncommon.

Also I'm pretty sure new users will not understand why Crop is disabled. You 
get no feedback from the mouse cursor when hovering over an image, so they 
might never new that you can select a region in the editor.
My cousin has used digiKam once and she also tried to crop something, but it 
was disabled. I didn't help her because I wanted to see what she will do now.
After cursing (:-)) she finally used the ratio crop tool and was quite happy.
She never touched the normal crop again and I think she still doesn't know 
that you can select a region.

This is a major problem. We need either change the cursor to some crosshair 
pointer, or we need to always enable the crop action, but give a warning, like 
in the red eye tool.

But I still think this action is totally useless (never thought I would say 
this about a digiKam feature, but it is actually true).
Also the selection widget is much better in RatioCrop...

So what to do? We could run a poll on the digiKam website (and write a mail to 
the users ML), but this wouldn't reach all users for sure.

Andi

On Wednesday 20 May 2009 09:48:05 Gilles Caulier wrote:
> Andi,
>
> I thinking something like this too.
>
> I recieve too some remark about this duplicates actions.
>
> I can't see any way where single crop cannot be done with ratio crop
> tool. Before to remove something. I recommend to ask to users. Perhaps
> they know a situation where single crop is really mandatory...
>
> Gilles
>
> 2009/5/20 Andi Clemens <andi.clemens at gmx.net>:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I just asked myself if we really need the normal crop method?
> > I was at my uncle's birthday last week and I already evangelized him to
> > use digiKam :-)
> > When he is cropping images, he ALWAYS uses the RatioCropTool, even when
> > he is doing a manual selection with no ratio at all.
> > He has given me two reasons:
> >
> > 1. He is not able to drag the normal selection like in the RatioCropTool
> > 2. He likes to see the Rule-of-Thirds
> >
> > He also said that it is somehow confusing to have two crop methods,
> > especially when you use IE for the first time. The action is always
> > disabled (sure) and you need to do a selection first (which is not that
> > obvious).
> >
> > So my proposal would be to remove the normal crop action and rename the
> > ratiocrop. I have never seen any other application that provides two or
> > more crop actions / tools, it is always put together into one tool.
> >
> > What do you think?
> >
> > Andi
> > _______________________________________________
> > Digikam-devel mailing list
> > Digikam-devel at kde.org
> > https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-devel
>
> _______________________________________________
> Digikam-devel mailing list
> Digikam-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-devel