Version: unspecified (using Devel) OS: unspecified I usually need to select some images from ~/Pictures to be sended by email or sended via IM. I feel that the Open dialog is just too limited to preview images, so I use Dolphin first to browse them. But even with Preview on, with good size (not huge), the preview is small. And when needed to pickup the correct image from many same kinds (like the image what is blurred, so it looks same as non-blurred) in same folder, you need a bigger preview. So you need to launch a gwenview to see is the image correct or not. So you loose the selection or you need to drag'n'drop all images one by one to KMail window or even copy them to new folder first. The Gwenview is great application for just browsing some images what will end up stored to Pictures and handle Nepomuk metadata and do a basic fixes for them, like cropping, resizing and even export to web services trought kipi-plugins. But best purpose for Gwenview is the slideshow function for friends when having all images in one directory. Then the more powerfull photo management application the digiKam just is great for managing thousands photos in multiple different ways, from multiple albums and do lots of edits for them. But It is overrated if not already lanched and wanted to just send few photos to friend trought IM. (Even that Drag'n'Drop and Emailing them functions work great!). Apple made a animated previews to Finder and you have a small bar what shows you the position. But I think it is overpowered and someway useless for actually managing the images (or photos). KDE added a very nice feature for single click use, the "Add" icon to top left corner of the icon (actually it is not top of the icon, but top of the file name, what is not good) what shows up when you hover top of the icon (there are wishes to make it permanent for touchscreens and locked to icon top left corner and not positioned by the file name lenght) and you can with single click select multiple files. I want to extend that great functionality for preview. And make the Dolphin have a better preview function, still not being a picture viewer like Gwenview or Photo management like digiKam, but just simple filemanager what allows user to go trough pictures in the current folder and select them and then close the preview. Everything without loosing the selections. The idea is that the function is pure preview. Nothing can do for the shown pictures. Like you can not rotate, flip, rate, delete, email them at all. Only preview and select. So the functionality of Dolphin is kept very simple and intuitive. Here is simple animation (Sorry, it is a GIF, because I do not know how to make smooth animation because I do not know such nice apps for Linux. If you do, please tell me. Especially if you can get a wanted object travel the path etc.) Please see the attachment for mockups. As you can see, first you move the mouse over the icon and you can see the typical + sign. When you select the picture/photograph/video/text/document/etc what has the preview, you get the preview icon top right corner. Clicking it opens the preview of 520x325 or such in correct rotation. It does not grow when resizing the dolphin window so even that you have fullscreen mode on, the preview is about that size. The preview is top of the files, always positioned middle of the view. The background (fileview, not the dolphin itself) gets darkened so the surrounding of the preview gets about 74-127 level of gray (on 0-255 scale) and you can see files behind it. The preview have four icons on it: * Top left corner has the + icon, just like the other files have on dolphin. It is similar and understanded to be same function as typically on file selection. * Bottom of the preview are two arrows, to browse files behind the preview. There could be idea to have other smaller arrows what would allow to browse PDF or Doc files. But I do not like that idea at all. I want just simple preview for the preview and not make a complex browsing like Apple. * Top right corner has the "Close view" icon to allow closing the preview. First I had a idea to allow closing the view just by clicking the gray area, but it is not clear right away that would do it. And you could click the sidepanels or other buttons what would move the dolphin to that position. So it is needed to tell the user that clicking it close the preview. Other problem what I notices what I am not sure, is that would people mistake that icon for "Delete" icon. So I planned to add to bottom right corner a trashbin icon but it cluttered the preview and made it a filemanager and not preview. So I did not want it to be included. That is the usability question about the icon way. So clickin the gray area does nothing, but clickin the sidepanels or other Dolphin toolbars acts as preview would not be enabled. When clicking the arrows to browse previous/next files on the folder and you select the files on the preview, you can see them being selected on background. So you can see right away where you are going on files. So there is no need any numbers to be shown. And the dolphin fileview would automatically scroll to correct positions so you can see the selections. So usually it would keep the view so the current row of the files are shown and preview would not hide everything if you do not go to middle position. The preview would not allow watching inside the folder or show previews of folders. Only about normal files. If the file does not have a preview option enabled on configs, it will not be shown. This idea, linking the preview for dolphin preview configs I am not sure. But folders it does not show. Videos it would show and idea is that it would take 5 seconds - 5 minutes steps (depending video lenght, on small clips just 5 secs, on movies minutes) on videos and show 3-5 seconds on that part on every step. So you can preview the video fast way. One idea for this was that video would be played fast forward with 10x speed. So you could just see the preview of video. After the preview and selecting some files, you would just close the preview and you could do what every you want to the files what Dolphin allows. You can add them as attachment to emails, drag them to the IM window or delete them or even rename easily. You only gained the bigger, faster and more intuitive preview without sliding the preview sizes on bottom of dolphin. And you had a live video preview as well. We can have now previews on sidepanels for audio and video on small screen. But for me it seems that people usually opens the application itself because the preview is not big enough. For audio it works well. Image preview are small and most times enough but sometimes you want just browse fast and littlebit bigger size. So you would need to resize the dolphin previews and wait it to cache them. And for the arrows position, I noticed that they feel better when they are bottom of the preview, always shown (this is not a player/slideshow, just preview function). And the usually JavaScript/Flash preview on websites where you have preview sliced to two parts where right side clicking moves forward and left side clicking to previus does not work so well. The arrows could be same as on the Gwenview and the dolphin sidepanel and other mediaplayers. But I just choosed the blueones now there because it is about filemanagement and not playing anything. This feature request was originally submitted through KDE Brainstorm, and has been submitted to Bugzilla due to popular demand. Original idea: http://forum.kde.org/brainstorm.php?mode=idea&i=85386 Reproducible: Didn't try
The mockup is too big for an attachment, so here is a link to the original: http://saukonpaa.com/videos/preview.gif
Although i generally like the idea of bigger previews when hovering an image i don't like the idea to basically embed gwenview (or just some photo viewer) in dolphin. And it seems it's not needed at all! Did you know of the "show tooltips" option? Go to: Configure Dolphin -> General -> Behavior now check "Show tooltips" ^_^ isn't that all you need?
The tooltip previews are tiny and lack the navigation and selection features seen here.
I like the idea as it is shown in the mockup! I'd also like to see this for sound files *gg*.
(In reply to comment #4) > I like the idea as it is shown in the mockup! I'd also like to see this for > sound files *gg*. Yes, the sound file (and video?) previews would be nice. GNOME 3 got this. I couldn't find the blog post from planet.gnome.org now but it had siniwave on it. It were not actually a like my suggested preview window but the icons had the sini waves as thumbnails. I tought sawing that it was wonderfull idea. As we have thumbnails as small preview for pictures, we need to see them, so size does matter and so on we need bigger preview for photos. But for audio, we do not need to see them bigger, we need to hear them. So for them it works better when you can hear the audio file when you hover over it, no matter do you have selected one, multiple or none of the files. With photos it does not work so well if we dont get bigger preview and then we need some way to select them and keep selection of earlier ones.
I'il add another opinion in here since things changed quite a bit in possibilities since my last made a comment. Previously there was no such thing as QML (or not in Qt anyway)! The apple like example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPgxoGMaaR0 and the http://saukonpaa.com/videos/preview.gif example both became real possibilities with Qt's introduction of QML and Qt5. Why? Well, to make this happen in the current dolphin or dolphin 2 a LOT of code has to be added in dolphin to make a preview feature like the mac's finder one possible. The animated gif example is easier to make but even then it's far from trival to make that in Qt's QWidget system. With Dolphin 2 things become somewhat easier to implement but still not trival. However, in QML the animated gif example becomes easy to implement since Dolphin 2 already uses QGraphics (right?) so all we need there is someone to implement it. The more advanced option of doing the same like Mac's finder is now also possible -- ignoring for a moment if we should want that -- It becomes possible since we now have: - Phonon QML element (for playing audio/video) - Image QML element (exists since QML exists) So all we need on top of that is the ability to preview other file formats. Dolphin internally already has that code so it would be nice if someone could take that en make a QML thingy of it which in turn needs to find it's way in dolphin. As a side effect that will probably also make the dolphin codebase cleaner i guess.
Resetting assignee to default as per bug #305719
This seems like an almost exact duplicate of https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=272539, which would indeed be very nice (before switching to Linux with KDE software, I was a Mac user since forever and made heavy use of that feature). *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 272539 ***