image viewers: a different approach

[Michael Olbrich]

Hi,

I have been following the discussion on KView and I think we need to
take a step back. Focusing on individual applications will only result
in chaos.
The first step would be to look at the different tasks we want to
accomplish. For me there are 4:

1. basic viewer. For links on webpages, emails and individual local
images.
Features: fast, incremental loading, zoom. Maybe scrolling by dragging.
This is probably somewhere between khtmlimage and KView.

2. Enhanced viewer. For image folders (photos). Basic manipulation.
Features: previews, step through images, rotate (and save), exif
manipulation.
Most of the current viewers fit more or less in this category.

3. Image organization. Not so much a viewer but closely related from the
users perspective. From a simple folder layout to a database, depending
on what the user wants.
Kimdaba belongs in this category. Afaik digikam has such features as
well.

4. Image manipulation. That's the other direction from 2.
We have krita here.


I'm sure other people can come up with different feature combinations.
That's ok as long as we keep the whole hirarchy in mind. And even more
important: make sure that the different applications interact properly.
Can't rotate in the basic viewer? No problem, the enhanced viewer is
just one click (or shortcut) away.
You find an photo with red eyes while browsing an image folder? One
click to open it in krita.

And don't forget that some people want standalone applications while
others prefer everything embeded in konqueror. There is no one right way
to do it.

michael