[KPhotoAlbum] UI-Glitch?

[Johannes Zarl-Zierl]

Hi Andreas,

Am Dienstag, 2. Februar 2021, 21:03:19 CET schrieb Andreas Schleth:
> I had to try the search box in thumbnail view *for the first time ever*
> to be able to answer.

...which is not surprising since searching in the thumbnail view entered git 
master on January 26.

> It seems to do a global string search across all labels and category
> entries to filter the thumbnails on the fly.
> OK if I ever wanted to find my image file P1240312.jpg this might be a
> use case for me, but who looks at the filenames anyway (as long as they
> are reasonably unique).

I agree that the most useful feature of freeform search for most people will 
probably filtering by tags. Still, sometimes you *do* want to filter by 
pathname components and not all images are just named sequentially: e.g. I 
also add scans of old photographs to my database. When I already go to some 
effort to process those scans, naming each file in a meaningful way comes 
naturally.

> I use the search box in many other cases (when sifting through
> categories or so) but then I always know which data pool I am fishing in.
> 
> So my preference would be #3:
> - when in thumbnail view: focus on the thumbnails,
> - when in other views: focus on the search box.

Thanks for your input.

> This might be inconsistent from the view of the programmer, but I guess
> it is much more natural for the user.

It's not so much me speaking as a programmer (even though is is more work than 
a consistent behaviour). Its more the additional learning curve for a 
newcomer. For us all (as long-term users) variant #3 feels natural because we 
are used to the search bar only being enabled for pages other than the 
thumbnail view. For a new user, consistency makes the whole program easier to 
learn.

That's why the more I think about it the more I'm leaning towards variant #4: 
it is consistent across pages and also with other programs. It frees up screen 
space (although at the price of discoverability), and it doesn't add another 
layer of hacks to make it work (e.g. compared to the "filter by token" feature 
I added in 5.7).

> * Then we have the two special items Exif and Search (and the Geo
> Position which in my case hangs indefinitely (but I also do not use it))

I assume it hangs doing disk IO when you click it on the top level and your 
exif cache was never recreated since support for geo positioning was added? In 
that case, you can wait for it to read the GPS information from all older 
files once and it will be fast afterwards. Or you don't use the GPS page as 
you currently do and won't pay the performance penalty for something that you 
don't even use.


Cheers,
  Johannes