Review Request 118961: Treat video thumbnails the same as image thumbnails

Diego Soenens hyperz.2007 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 2 18:12:21 BST 2014 


> On June 26, 2014, 7:15 p.m., Emmanuel Pescosta wrote:
> > Thanks for the patch!
> > 
> > Applying a shadow frame to video thumbnails really makes sense, but I think we should go even further and apply it to other thumbnails as well.
> 
> Diego Soenens wrote:
>     Which ones are you thinking of? There are some that shouldn't have it I think like .exe and .ico files because more often than not they have transparency.
>     Also, what would be the best way to discriminate between them (checking dozens of mime types would get ugly really fast)?
>     
>     Sorry I'm new to all this :).
> 
> Emmanuel Pescosta wrote:
>     > they have transparency.
>     Transparency is no problem, we only use the bounding rect for the shadow effect.
>     
>     I think of PDFs, (odf, txt, ...) documets and so on - almost all thumbnails.
>     IMHO mixing flat thumbails with shadow applied thumbnails looks bad (hee before.png).
>     
>     So why not applying it to all thumbnails? 
>     
>     > checking dozens of mime types would get ugly really fast
>     Yep whitelisting a lot of types is a no-go, but if we apply the shadow to all
>     thumbnails we only need to check if the current item is a directory.
>     
>     > Sorry I'm new to all this
>     Np, feel free to ask questions and just write down your thoughts ;)
>     
>     We should better wait for Frank.
> 
> Diego Soenens wrote:
>     > So why not applying it to all thumbnails?
>     
>     Most ThumbCreator's return the ThumbCreator::DrawFrame flag in their flags() function to draw a 1px frame around the image to give them a depth/3d-ish effect for example.
>     This causes the preview to appear blurry around the edge when combined with the shadow frame (see http://i.imgur.com/TfRqFmN.png).
>     I guess those preview plugins could be updated afterwards to change the flag they return to ThumbCreator::None?
> 
> Emmanuel Pescosta wrote:
>     > Most ThumbCreator's return the ThumbCreator::DrawFrame flag in their flags() function to draw a 1px frame around the image to give them a depth/3d-ish effect for example.
>     In my opinion this should be changed. A thumbnail shoud only be an image of the actual data without a frame because drawing shadows and so on should definitely be 
>     part of the application. This "always" draw an frame around some thumbnails is also bad in the information panel.
>     
>     But please wait for Franks opinion ;)
> 
> Frank Reininghaus wrote:
>     I'm not sure if we should apply shadows to all thumbnails. We even got negative feedback about the shadows for images from users who work a lot with icons and other images which have a lot of transparency. Shadows make less sense for this kind of image than for, e.g., photos. I think that adding shadows to video thumbnails might make sense though - thanks for working on it!
>     
>     I'm not familiar with the ThumbCreator flags - where does this drawing of the 1 pixel frame happen?
> 
> Diego Soenens wrote:
>     Yeah I agree.
>     
>     > I'm not familiar with the ThumbCreator flags - where does this drawing of the 1 pixel frame happen?
>     
>     It seems to be handled in kde-runtime/kioslave/thumbnail/thumbnail.cpp (line 287).
> 
> Emmanuel Pescosta wrote:
>     > We even got negative feedback about the shadows for images from users who work a lot with icons
>     Ok good point. But what about shadows for documents, e.g. PDFs or ODTs? 
>     I think shadow also makes sense in these cases.
>     
>     IMHO we should apply shadows to all different kinds of thumbnails and only exclude icons and other problematic types.
>     (Example - other FM with shadows on documents: http://www.stboston.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Mac-OSX-Finder.png)
> 
> Diego Soenens wrote:
>     Would QPixmap::hasAlphaChannel() work as a way to check if the thumbnail has transparency?
>     If so, maybe the best way to go about it would be to check if the item is not a directory and hasAlphaChannel() returns false?
>     
>     Also, quick question regarding ReviewBoard: does Close -> Submitted commit the patch or will I need to setup git?
>     Or is it up to the reviewer(s) to do that? The documentation is rather vague about the whole process :/.
> 
> Emmanuel Pescosta wrote:
>     > Would QPixmap::hasAlphaChannel() work as a way to check if the thumbnail has transparency?
>     Using the alpha channel of an image to decide if shadow shoud be applied or not is a little bit problematic, because there are a bunch of image formats which support transparency (e.g. png) and should have a shadow effect.
>     
>     So a blacklist for problematic image types would be the better solution here.
>     
>     > does Close -> Submitted commit the patch or will I need to setup git?
>     No, it only closes this review request. You have to push the patch (this review request will be automatically set to submitted when you add the corresponding "REVIEW: 118961" commit hook).
>     
>     Given that you have no git account yet, we'll push it for you ;)
> 
> Emmanuel Pescosta wrote:
>     Hmm and what if we apply it to all images and use the transparency information instead of the image size to apply the shadow effect?
>     So we have no mixing of shadow and no shadow anymore and the user can immediately see if the image has transparent areas, so no
>     more solid borders on transparent images (current version does this for pngs, ...).
>     
>     This can be achieved really easily with the QPainter composition mode.
> 
> Frank Reininghaus wrote:
>     Removing the border completely from transparent images might be problematic because the border also helps to identify the "clickable area".
>     
>     BTW, I found one report where there was a discussion about the shadows: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=295526
> 
> Diego Soenens wrote:
>     > Hmm and what if we apply it to all images and use the transparency information instead of the image size to apply the shadow effect?
>     
>     Wouldn't that look really weird for a lot of icons that already have a drop-shadow or similar effect as part of the icon?
>     90% of the transparent images on my PC are application icons and the like that already have shadows.
>     
>     > Removing the border completely from transparent images might be problematic because the border also helps to identify the "clickable area".
>     
>     I've personally never had issues with that. If most transparent images are usually icons it should be fairly obvious to the user where he/she can click I think.
>     Even if it's a blank transparent image with no shadow frame I don't think anyone would have problems clicking/selecting it because of the file name etc.
> 
> Emmanuel Pescosta wrote:
>     > Wouldn't that look really weird for a lot of icons that already have a drop-shadow or similar effect as part of the icon?
>     Oh good point, I completely missed that! (Never work with icons)
>     
>     What do you think about my previous idea, blacklisting of problematic file types?
>     
>

> What do you think about my previous idea, blacklisting of problematic file types?

The problem I see with that is that it's not always the file type that is problematic but its properties (size, has (semi)transparency, etc).
I'm not sure if there's a "perfect" solution to this. Checking every pixmap for transparency every time might be really expensive(?).

Personally I think that maybe the best way to solve it is do as you suggest first: shadow frame on everything, except "obvious" file types like Windows exe's.
Additionally, make it an option the user can turn off so it doesn't have to be a problem for some users that deal with lots of icon-type files or other corner cases.


- Diego


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On June 26, 2014, 6:59 p.m., Diego Soenens wrote:
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/118961/
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> (Updated June 26, 2014, 6:59 p.m.)
> 
> 
> Review request for Dolphin.
> 
> 
> Repository: kde-baseapps
> 
> 
> Description
> -------
> 
> A minor (but very noticeable) inconsistency that has been bugging me in Dolphin is the fact that video thumbnails don't get the nice shadow frame added that image thumbnails have.
> Video snapshots are essentially images, and often times these two file types will be in the same folder. So to me it doesn't make sense to treat them differently.
> 
> 
> Diffs
> -----
> 
>   dolphin/src/kitemviews/kfileitemmodelrolesupdater.cpp 0865d40 
> 
> Diff: https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/118961/diff/
> 
> 
> Testing
> -------
> 
> Works fine (see before/after screenshots).
> 
> 
> File Attachments
> ----------------
> 
> Before
>   https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/media/uploaded/files/2014/06/26/11ed57e4-04af-4ff0-9963-7a183dfcb035__before.png
> After
>   https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/media/uploaded/files/2014/06/26/ae8c87c1-fb61-48ee-ba3c-11070752edb3__after.png
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Diego Soenens
> 
>

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