[KPhotoAlbum] RFC: remove interactive thumbnail resizing

Jan Kundrát jkt at gentoo.org
Tue Mar 8 08:11:02 GMT 2011


Hi,
the current thumbnail handling code forces a full flush of all
thumbnails when user resizes their size. This resizing can happen either
by specifying the size in pexels from inside the settings dialog, or by
middle mouse buttton with drag (or ctrl-alt-drag) in the thumbnail view.
The trouble is, this resizing takes time, and is mainly disk IO-bound,
so it takes a lot of time.

Risto has proposed an interesting idea on IRC, that it could make sense
to load only every second image in the thumbnail view before the rest of
them. I don't like this approach, because:

a) "Every second" feels like an arbitrary heuristic to me,
b) It's a *lot* of work,
c) It tries to fix a symptom rather than the problem,
d) Who keeps resizing the thumbnail widget all the time?

So, it occured to me that it might make sense to disable the interactive
resizing of the cell size in thumbnail widget. Maybe it's too Gnome-ish
:), but at least it would make it obvious that when one resizes the
grid, it will take time to load the images again.

Another way would be not to flush the thumbnail cache at that point, but
queue a regeneration of images. I'm not sure if that's a great idea, and
I suspect it's not even possible with our current code to return a
"rough" pixmap followed by a "fine" version later on...

Cheers,
Jan

-- 
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