[Digikam-devel] [Bug 205776] "Embedded preview loads full image size" does not only do what it says, confusing users

[Matti Rintala]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205776





--- Comment #13 from Matti Rintala <bitti cs tut fi>  2009-09-01 12:08:42 ---
Gilles,

I'm not familiar with Digikam's internals, but I got the impression that raw
files' embedded previews are stored in exif data (at least in the raw files
I've worked with). So is libraw should not be needed for that?

Marcel,

In your second list, are choices a) and b) switched? I.e. reduced-size embedded
preview is better than fulls-size for fast preview)?

And yes, I think also that "high-quality" is a difficult concept with raw
previews. 

The embedded preview is produced by camera or raw editing program, so it's
conversion parameters are probably better than Digikam's. Also, if dcraw -h
-style preview raw decoding is used by Digikam (is it?), raw-decoded preview is
only half-size (makes it worse for checking focus). If the raw file has been
edited (Capture NX2 etc.), the embedded preview is the only right option, since
there's no way to tell how much the image has been edited (without being able
to decode the editing metadata stored by the raw editor). So people using
Digikam only for photo management but not raw photo editing (that's me) need
embedded previews.

On the other hand, if the embedded preview is very small or of low quality,
then Digikam's raw decoding produces a better result. The same probably applies
if the user is going to edit the raw file in Digikam anyway (preview shows the
starting point).

My opinion is that the choice between embedded raw previews and raw decoding
should be user's. There's no way to know which is "high quality" for a
particular user's needs.

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