Created attachment 114508 [details]
window size

Today I started out with a dozen photos of my daughter and wanted to create some 10x15cm (4x6") prints to put in a (real paper) album. Before deciding which images to use for the large prints I wanted to create a thumbnail preview page with all photos to print out.

But the state of the current print dialog (digikam-6.0-20180727 appimage) is just so bad that I wasn't able to generate any sensible results. Please don't take this personally, I'm taking time to describe all issues in detail so we can fix them and think of improvements. Some are (probably) trivial and straight forward, some might require some thinking.

Thank you!

So, here we go:

1. The print dialog opens in a tiny window where almost nothing is visible. See attached screenshot #1. You have to resize this window before being able to do anything. What's more, the window size isn't remembered when using the print dialog multiple times.
=> Please choose a sensible default size that avoids most scrollbars and where all elements are readable. 860x650 seems to be a good choice on my computer, but this might depend on screen fonts and so on.

2. The print dialog always takes all images of the current album by default. It should only use *visible* images (there might be a properties filter and grouped images) or *selected* images by default. This works once, but if you go back and forth a couple times in the assistant the list of images is suddenly extended to contain all images of the current album.
I'm not sure about this, I could not reproduce it always, but there was something weird going on.

3. If you choose a thumbnail overview print layout and have a lot of (~50) images selected for inclusion, the application freezes for >10 seconds when it is generating thumbnails (I suppose) for the preview. There should be a kind of progress dialog or the thumbnail should be generated asynchronously. Users will assume Digikam has crashed. And, why is Digikam not using the thumbnails from the main view? This should be much faster.

4. When removing images from the list (on the assistant page where you choose the paper layout) *using the right mouse button context menu* instead of the buttons, the images are not really removed - they stay on the thumbnail layout. But they are not in the list either.

5. With all the available dark themes (Black Body, Darkroom, Grey Card, ...), the button icons and labels are completely invisible. This is a generic issue with Digikam on Ubuntu, so maybe there is a generic solution? Also the borders of checkboxes are almost invisible.

6. The crop option in the print assistant does not allow zooming in/out to further fine tune the area of the image to be printed. Or am I missing something? There is no obvious way to zoom.

7. The crop selection rectangle behaves weird - it seems it can only be grabbed at the center and then jumps around if you grab it any other position. It should be possible to grab it at any position and drag it around.

8. There is no (obvious?) way of saving / repeating the crop position and size for multiple images, which is an important use case when you have dozens of almost identical portraits and want to create a thubmnail overview printout.

9. It would be a very nice feature if the crop window could autoadjust / zoom to encompass all available face rectangles (and associated heads if fully on the image) - and if only a single face rectangle exists, try to put it in a special position (e.g. the 3x3 crosshair crossing points).

10. It would be a plus if the print creator's crop position would be saved with the image and reused if the print creator would later be called up again.

11. It would be a plus if images could be reordered and also removed during cropping, since this allows for a more detailed preview than the other assistant's steps.

12. It would be a plus if not only the crop rectangle could be zommed in or out, but also the image itself - to have a quick look at image details again.

13. Sometimes the thumbnail order in the print preview, and in the crop preview, did not equal the thumbnail order that was set in the list. This is especially true if the user went forwards and backwards multiple times in the assistant.

14. In the preview list of images, there is no (obvious?) way of (re)sorting images based on metadata - e.g. time, filename, comment or tag(s).

15. There seems to be no (obvious?) way to set the white margin around each image in the thumbnail print layout. This would be a plus.

16. When the user goes back in the assistant and then returns to the caption settings, images in the list will be duplicated (added again). This should not happen. Instead, Digikam could offer a button "Reset list" above the list in the button bar.

These are my thoughts about the print creator after having used it for about an hour.
Please consider... :)

Thank you!