On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 6:40 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro@gnome.org> wrote:
Hi all,

In Fedora 20, Shotwell was the default image viewer and no other image
viewer was installed.  In F21 Shotwell is still the default, but now
Image Viewer (eog) is installed as well. This doesn't make any sense
since Image Viewer serves no purpose unless it's the default image
handler, whereas Shotwell is more useful for previewing and organizing a
collection of photos.

We've also recently noticed that gthumb looks like a nice alternative to
Shotwell. I propose we do one of the following:

* Replace Shotwell with gthumb, and remove Image Viewer.
* Replace Shotwell with gthumb, but keep Image Viewer as the default
image viewer.
* Remove Shotwell, and keep Image Viewer as the only image viewer.

Opinions welcome.

You might notice that I'm gunning for Shotwell here. It looks a lot
older than gthumb, and seems to have mostly the same functionality.
(Make sure to check out gthumb in F21, not F20. You wouldn't know they
were the same app due to the huge changes.) Image Viewer, in contrast,
is a simple app for just previewing images, which is a different
purpose, but I think gthumb can also serve this purpose just as well
while looking nicer.

There are other options, of course, which I am less fond of:

* Remove Image Viewer. (Shotwell remains.)
* Make Image Viewer the default image viewer. (Shotwell remains.)

Either of these would be more sensible than keeping Image Viewer if it
is not the default image viewer.

GNOME Photos is notably not one of the apps we're considering. We've
been told it's not ready yet.


Image viewers and photo managers are two separate applications for different use cases. The first is an essential tool for an operating system and usually launched from other programs, like the file manager or e-mail client, while a photo manager doesn't seem essential anymore given Fedora Workstation's target audience.

It makes sense to me to offer the photo management applications (gThumb, Shotwell, GNOME Photos, F-Spot, etc) in Software for those who want one and only install an essential image viewer by default. eog would be the immediate choice, since it has a simple user interface that fits well with the rest of GNOME. It's already a core component of GNOME so it would fit perfectly with the rest of Fedora, and comes with great documentation, i18n and a11y support.

--
Evandro