SUMMARY As an (partial) UX designer it's important to me to test how an image looks like in the end. In Dolphin, likely every PNG and SVG is rendered to match software configuration dimension e.g. an 16px*16px icon stretched to be 48px*48px not 16px*16px so the icon looks blurry and hard to test. Please consider to change this behavior so an image displayed to follow its canvas dimension size at least for common icon FreeDesktop size: 8px, 16px, 22px, 24px, 32px, 48px, 64px, 128px, 256px, 512px. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Open up dolphin 2. View some icon files in icon view OBSERVED RESULT Image file stretched and blurred EXPECTED RESULT Image file displayed follow its dimension size SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Windows: macOS: Linux/KDE Plasma: KDE Neon 5.17 User Edition (available in About System) KDE Plasma Version: 5.17.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.63.0 Qt Version: 5.13.1
IIRC we used to do this, but we got complaints about it--including by other icon designers who valued the ability to see the scaled up version in their file manager. For SVG icons, I don't really see the problem, since they're designed to look good when scaled up. However I can understand the problem for small raster images, which get scaled up and become blurry, which I'll admit does not look amazing. Since people seem to have different preferences regarding this, maybe we should just give in and add an option to enable/disable scaling up small images and icons. Gwenview has such an option, BTW.
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #1) > IIRC we used to do this, but we got complaints about it--including by other > icon designers who valued the ability to see the scaled up version in their > file manager. Thanks for your response, Nate. Really appreciate that. > For SVG icons, I don't really see the problem, since they're designed to > look good when scaled up. However I can understand the problem for small > raster images, which get scaled up and become blurry, which I'll admit does > not look amazing. As a vector image, yes SVG has no technical problem here. But still, being scaled up to a particular dimension for _every_ file is not acceptable for me. It's still a deception. > Since people seem to have different preferences regarding this, maybe we > should just give in and add an option to enable/disable scaling up small > images and icons. Gwenview has such an option, BTW. To look further, we can see this behavior in other file manager. I'm an GNOME veteran user and from my desktop experience, IMHO majority of GNOME based DE's file managers out there (Nautilus, PCManFM, Nemo, Pantheon files, Marlin, Thunar, etc) have the same behavior: they rendered icon as its actual canvas size. Try not to be "argumentum ad populum", but this choice far far helping me to get things done. And oh, this issue is a huge factor for me to keep away from using KDE. Everytime I try a KDE distro, I end up reinstall my machine with GNOME distro after losing hope since this situation has not change yet over the years. I have tried Gwenview to display 24px*24px icon, but unfortunately it show a huge distance from one icon to another and there's no way to shrink this which lead me a big struggle to scroll down.
Perhaps this could be made configurable?