Re: [gcmd-dev] Metatags

[Piotr Eljasiak]

> Magnus Stålnacke wrote:
> > 
> > I will test your latest changes tomorrow and get back
> > about that, plus some other things regarding, programs,
> > scripts and plugins i have been thinking about.
> > 
> 
> OK, here it comes.
> 
> I start with one thought about meta-tags.
> I feel there is a need for viewing meta-tags only,
> i think the proper place for it would be in a tab
> under rightclick->properties. With an image the
> F3 viewer is OK, but not if we are talking music
> or film. I wrote "feel there is a need" because
> i just use a simple script for it now, and of course
> that works just fine, but this was more thought as
> a newbie friendly thing.

You'd like to have possibility to see all metatags at once, would you?
'File properties' dialog seems to be a good place for that - it
accessible via menu, RMB menu, keyboard shortcut (and possibly via
toolbar). The only problem would be that the dialog is not very big and
it is quite difficult to have all tags in one place (maybe the solution
is to use a tree). But... it comes to me that 'file properties' dialog
would not be that comfortable when one wanted to view tags of many
files. In this case IMHO it'd be better to make standalone metatags
viewer - something in tradition of Assaf's int-viewer. But even better
is just to add support for user-defined columns - where the column might
be (apart from current 'standard' cols: name, ext, size, ...) any of
known metatags. This would allow viewing metatags of many files in a way
that is coherent with current gcmd GUI. What about it?

> The "$T(IPTC.Keywords,1)" does not work, it just wants
> to use all of them, just as "$T(IPTC.Keywords)", and i
> did not see any of your ' ' separator. Everything else
> seem to work as usual.

Sorry for being imprecise - I haven't implemented accessing keyword by
its index. IMHO it is very rare when this functionality would be used
and generally, I think, keywords may be used rather for file searching
than for adv-renaming... So this is the reason behind accessing all
keywords at once. BTW - ' ' separator is used as a 'glue' between
multiple keywords. I've chosen ' ' for it seems to be the most neutral,
but of course, it can be changed to ', ' or anything. Maybe something
user-configurable?

> I also saw your change to the NEWS file where you added
> advrename Exif and IPTC support, i was a bit to fast
> in updating the homepage, i will correct it since this
> change is a big change/new feature/new capability.

I've just backported metatags support from devel branch into HEAD.
Metatags code contains a LOT of translation strings and I'd like to give
translators some time before the release of 1.2.1. Besides I believe
that metatags are quite stable at the moment :o)

> Now over to my thoughts on scripts and programs, i think
> this needs some discussion. I think many of us tend to
> collect quite a number of of scripts doing various things.
> On some filetypes the list of "programs" in the rightclick
> menu risk beeing quite long, i remember Micha also mention
> this. A solution would be a tree, but there is more.
> 
> Think of Gimp, there we have both scripts and plugins.
> What i am thinking of here is a catalog that you just
> put scripts under, /usr/lib/gnome-commander/scripts
> would probably be the proper place for global scripts,
> and of course the same for user scripts under
> ~/.gnome-commander/scripts - Just like in Gimp.
> 
> How to make the tree then? Well, just make the rightclick
> menu reflect a folder tree under gnome-commander/scripts
> 
> Lets say that i have four scripts for image processing,
> one for Exif, one IPTC, one for downscaling and framing
> and one for scaling to really small pics.
> Then i just save my gcmd-scripts in a tree under scripts
> like this:
> .
> |-- MetaData
> |   |-- Exif.sh
> |   `-- IPTC.sh
> `-- Scaling
>      |-- Frame-n-Scale.sh
>      `-- MkSmall.sh
> 
> And this will produce a menu where "Scripts" has two childs,
> MetaData and Scaling that each contains two scripts. But how
> to show only relevant scripts, or having irrelevant entries
> in the menu greyed out depending on filetype? Could this be
> done in the script itself?
> Maybe like this:
> 
> #!/bin/sh
> #GCMD-Extentions: *.jpg;*.tif;*.ppm
> #GCMD-Terminal: yes
> #GCMD-DisplayName: EntryName
> 
> I think this could be one solution of handling scripts.
> One could easily think of other #GCMD-options in the script,
> like "close terminal on exit", "minimize to bay" maybee even
> what terminal to use, the terminal command with colors
> and so on.
> 
> But of course.
> It could also be done in the /editor/ under "Programs dialog"
> with a modification to the "Name" field that takes an entry like
> (with the above example of scripts):
> 
> Name:    Scripts|MetaData|Exif
> Command: /search/path/to/Exif.sh
> 
> This solution is even simpler userwise to make a menu tree,
> and it makes no visible difference to the programs "editor"
> of today, and does not introduce any GCMD-specific things in
> the scripts. Well, what do you think?

I like the second solution - it has cleaner interface. The user menu
(containing scripts/application entries) would be a part of context menu
and be accessible as usual - via RMB and keyboard shortcut SHIFT+F10.

> And about advrename on searchresult, no that did not work,
> but i guess you already knew that.

Metatags are currently used by advrename only. I think file searching is
somewhat broken at the moment and needs to be fixed. I am thinking also
about adding metatags support to int-viewer to cleanup the interface and
not to depend on external tools. But these will be done later - in
1.2.2.


Piotr