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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.)

[img]http://saukonpaa.com/videos/preview.gif[/img]

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.

Could you just resize your picture so that it isn't that big.

you need to scroll it littlebit to right with the wheel (or Alt+Wheel) to see the preview right side (this site should have scrollbars for those).

Or you can right click the image and select from there "show Image" etc.

I would not like to resize the animation because it does not show the exact function then. Afterall it is about specific sized preview function

Edit: I resized the animation. Got it 1 megabytes smaller as well. But i still think now it does not bring the feature as well up because the preview and icons looks smaller

Very good idea, I really like the mock-up.
Since you have already thought about most stuff there is not much to add, except a shortcut perhaps? (space bar in finder I think)

I would leave the shortcut by default off and allow it to be used only by the mouse. I am not sure about this, it could have shortcut to start it but it still would need the mouse to select/close. Browsing files would go like the typical way, left/right buttons.

Is there a shortcuts to select multiple files? I can only select multiple files with arrowkeys + Ctrl + spacebar combination and it does not show the movement with arrowkeys while keeping Ctrl pressed and selecting files with Space. it only adds/removes selection and it is pretty much blind working.

So I think that this should be for mouse/touchscreen function more than keyboard function.

If this would get a shortcut. I think it would be good that shortcut activates this. Example Alt+P (alternative preview).

Then pressing cursorkeys to right/left would browse the files as mouse pressing. And then spacebar would (de)select the file and Alt+P would again close the preview, keeping selection.

Esc can not be used to close the preview because it by default makes deselection in normal view. So it would not be logical.

+1

Great idea.

Two things I personally think would make it better:

Have the arrows directly below the image ( connected to the image by a border? ) to be able to see all of the image OR have the arrows fade in/out depending on whether the mouse is above them or not.

And...
Instead of having a giant close button you could middle click or something on the preview to close it, I think that would be better as an option rather than a default ( unless everyone else agrees ) though.

I thought the arrows position under the picture, corners/sides of the picture, top of the picture (in/outside) and they did not feel so good. They looked like the preview did not belong to the desktop environment itself. And they would hide more the files behind as well and make clutter there. Now when they are top of the picture it seems (at least for me) that you use them to browse the picture. Even that you have the possibility to believe that they belongs to the preview itself.

I can make a alternative mockup for that I place all the four icons outside of the preview.

The fading thing was something what I tought as well and it could be done but they should always be littlebit visible, like 25% opague. And it was again against the normal way how buttons are on desktop environment. Gwenview is as far I know the first application to hide the action button, hide/show sidepanel.

And I did not see it so relevant to hide the arrows because idea is not to watch a slideshow or present pictures trought it but just have a bigger preview for file selection.

The middleclick could be a extra function. But right now middleclick does nothing on files and on folder it opens it to new tab. And user does not get any information to use middleclick to close the preview. Thats why I placed the close icon top right corner.

They are now huge because I needed to use 128x128 icons for smaller preview. But they would be little smaller if implented, but not same size as now the file picker.

Dolphin already has a couple of other ways to get larger previews for single files - the tool tip (if enabled - shows larger version of the already-visible icon, preview or no) and the Information panel (if enabled).
I see this as duplicated effort as when you want to have the large preview of files one-by-one, you just open the information panel (enable previews in the panel if necessary) and as you hover over files the information panel will show the preview of that file (size of preview relative to size of panel). The information panel can also preview movies - hover over one and controls will appear which allow you to play the movie right in the file manager.
Similarly you can get previews of files in the tooltips if you have them enabled but a lot of people may find tooltips annoying and so they disable them, but they are actually quite useful (perhaps more useful if you could configure the size of the tooltip preview).

@airdrik, as I said, there is the information panel on the right side what can show video preview or play music. But it is still not the answer for bigger preview. Already the sidepanel is duplicated work for previews when you have previews enabled on the fileview.

We can not resize the sidepanel to over 500px wide on small screens to get under 500px preview. Try that on netbook! We can not force users to have the information panel in the first place when they want to save the space for the files.

And the tooltops bugs a lots. When you have file near the right edge of screen, the toolt flickers because it can not position itself correctly.

And the tooltip is slower way to go trought files because you need to wait that the tooltip is shown and when you move mouse away from it, it gets hided. And sometimes you need to move the mouse to get the selection shown and if you do a mistake press you loose all selected files. The advanced preview does not allow such.

And in worse case, you might have information previews enabled, information panel and tooltips enabled. So you end up having three previews, almost with same informations and none of them show the enough big preview (if you do not drag the information panel to fullscreen... dah)

The information panel is great when user does not have previews enabled. Even then the tooltops are better. But there is a need to have a big preview without sidepanel taking space and without waiting a tooltip jumping around in different places and showing a still small preview.

(and as a sidenote, the information/tooltip preview does not always work. You can see wrong image previews in there when hovering over files. So you end up to get wrong information. It is a bug what needs to be fixed to get them work in their part).

The point is, if you need to open a information panel and resize it to take half of the space on the fileview, it is not a resolution at all, it is a way a around and lousy one.

Maybe those who have the > 19" screens ( I have 24") keeping dolphin in fullscreen/maximized can spend 50% of screen space for information panel preview to be big enough, but most users would then just click the file and open it on gwenview to have the big view, close the gwenview and select the files.

Fri13 wrote:Maybe those who have the > 19" screens ( I have 24") keeping dolphin in fullscreen/maximized can spend 50% of screen space for information panel preview to be big enough, but most users would then just click the file and open it on gwenview to have the big view, close the gwenview and select the files.

Well, I have a 15" laptop screen, and don't keep dolphin maximised, but then I user Preview as just that - a preview. I see no need for anything bigger than we have now. Applications are for viewing at larger size, previews are for ensuring that we've opened the correct files. If I wanted to compare two images I would expect to open both in an application that would allow me to see fine details, and no previewer should be expected to do that.

Applications are for viewing at larger size, previews are for ensuring that we've opened the correct files.

Many users have multiple versions of the pictures or other files what looks identical because small preview, opening a four pictures to four different gwenview window just to select the correct one makes things slower. And opening just one gwenview but using next/previous buttons for the four, is again slow because you need to remember what the picture was, close the gwenview and select the wanted picture.

Old people have problems with selecting correct file because:
a) file preview is not big enough
b) information panel preview is not big enough with sensible size
c) using external application to just see a good preview is more complex.

That is one reason why even Apple made the Cover Flow effect to Finder, to show a preview of files in bigger size without need to open a external application to do it.
I believe that they just made it over by having way to browse PDF pages on it etc.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPgxoGMaaR0

And I usually turn the preview off on information panel because I like to use the preview in files and the double preview when hoving is just space wasting for tags and other information.

ps. If you do not think we need bigger previews than what we have now, can we then remove the possibility to grow preview thumbnails as big as now from bottom slider or resize the information panel to fullsize?

-1
Use Konqueror...

I think it would be better to integrate this into Gwenview instead.

So user should start using konqueror instead Gwenview when wanted to see bigger preview?
And Konqueror can not show anything like this either. So switch is not possible by multiple different reasons even after that.

And this can not be added to Gwenview because Gwenview already has the preview function. It is the Picture Viewer itself already.

You have my vote, this is a great idea, and hope to see it soon

I added a similar idea brainstorm.php#idea89330_page1 and really would like something like this or like my proposal to be included KDE.