GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 323745
A configuration setting is needed to specify the slideshow folder
Last modified: 2010-08-18 23:06:28 UTC
The personal slideshow will only look in ~/Pictures. For a swedish person like me it would be very strange to have a Pictures in my homedir (I have a folder ~/Bilder). But having hardcoded folders for things that may be customized by the user is just plain wrong. I know about "gnome-screensaver have a .desktop for every setting", but that just doesn't work for 100% of the use cases. This is one that it fails, a setting is needed.
At the moment the consensus seems to be the the directory should be in English and it should be translated in the UI. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-November/msg00249.html There is no need to have this be configurable. You can always change the screensaver theme to point to any directory that you choose.
THIS is the thing Linus spoke about. When you are forcing the user to do something against the users will, in the name of "usability". I and the majority of the people in the world doesn't think it improves usability to have a folder named "Picutres" on my desktop. And managing pictures are a quite common task these days. And saying that we already have this kind of behaviour is not an excuse, in that case you could throw in a few segfaults as well.
I'm very sorry you've decided to take this approach. I've tried to explain the problems involved with what you request. Perhaps you've noticed the on disk name of your Desktop folder, or Templates folder, etc? There isn't a perfect solution for this at the moment and you aren't suggesting a good one. Take care.
I'm sorry for beeing rude (it was early and I hadn't got any coffe). Why don't you just use a gconf key for the directory and let the user configure it? Why the fear for configuration options? I realize that in most cases it works to add a new screensaver, but for things like the users image folder you must have an configurable option. I use $HOME as desktop and have added Templates to ~/.hidden so I don't have a problem with not translated folders. However Pictures is a commonly used folder, Templates isn't (I bet most users never see Templates). And since untranslated folders is a problem that is still not solved, I think it is wise to avoid them.
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gnome-screensaver/+bug/47604 discusses the same bug.
As Daniel mentioned, I've posted a potential win-win workaround for this problem. I'll ammend my suggestion here for completeness. I created a folder called ~/.personal-slideshow-pictures and then updated /usr/share/gnome-screensaver/themes/personal-slideshow.desktop so that: Exec=slideshow --location=.personal-slideshow-pictures This allows me to create sym links in ~/.personal-slideshow-pictures to whatever folder I like for pictures. I personally don't have a Pictures folder (I may have used that if I had known there was some benefit to doing so) instead I copied my "My Pictures" folder over from Windows. Just for completeness, I created a symlink to Pictures (which doesn't exist): ln -s ~/Pictures ~/.personal-slideshow-pictures/Pictures and then another one to My Pictures (which does exist): ln -s ~/My\ Pictures ~/.personal-slideshow-pictures/My\ Pictures The screensaver worked perfectly. Using this technique, the GNOME team could create links to ~/Bilder and other localized names by default and then users could create links in this folder if one of the default options isn't available. Just a suggestion...
also: the only way I could find out that it was ~/picture was googeling for gnome-screensaver, and then stumbling on a bugreport on ubuntu... is ~/pictures a standard place to put your pictures these days? f-spot doesn't seem to think so. It puts pictures in ~/Photos
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAskedQuestions#head-da3828b140d636782bb9fca563cd992cffd777fd
This is a great step forward, but I still think the config setting might be needed. Do we really want to do the slideshow of all the images in the users-picture folder? I as a user may wan't to only display the pictures in the subfolder "Wedding". And changing the user-dir for Pictures may not be a good solution since I do not want gimp to default to the "Wedding" directory. I also may have my coverart for rhythmbox stored in the picures folder, or some icons I'm working on... I think the user-dir picture folder is a great default, but it still needs to be configurable since it doesn't cover all the use cases.
The f-spot slideshow theme will do all this and more. The pictures folder theme does not need to cover all the use cases.
Yes, but that assumes you use f-spot... is that even included in the official gnome release? Why is it such a hard thing to make this customizable? Can someone argue why this setting is a bad thing? The remove settings policy that was created between October Gnome and Gnome2 was not to remove ALL settings, it was to remove settings that existed to work around bugs.... this is NOT such a setting.
You can add a new slideshow theme that uses any location you like. The Pictures folder slideshow theme (not sure how to say this more clearly) - looks in the Pictures folder. Drag and drop the following file onto the preferences dialog: http://acs.pha.jhu.edu/~mccannwj/gnome-screensaver/wedding-slideshow.desktop If you don't use f-spot then get a similar feature for the photo management tool that you use. Please do not continue to post comments to closed bugs. Thanks.
Ok, I'll stop since you obviously doesn't care... but note that there hasn't been one single argument in this thread that explains why it would be a bad thing to have this configurable using a gui. There has been comments like "You can always change the screensaver theme to point to any directory that you choose." or "ln -s ~/My\ Pictures ~/.personal-slideshow-pictures/My\ Pictures". But you can't seriously believe that it is the right thing to have to resort to the commandline to to trivial adjustments to your graphical desktop environment...
Mattias, I don't know why the gnome developers feel its bad to allow screensavers to be configured... Here is what I've done: I like the glslideshow better. It *is* configurable, but you have to jump through a bunch of hoops. :-( * Install xscreensaver * From the commandline, run xscreensaver * Find glslideshow, click the advanced tab at the top of the window * Choose the folder(s) you want * Exit (may need to save your changes) * Uninstall xscreensaver (I think) This one looks and works a lot like the one on the mac where the images zoom in and out a little. Its a shame that you have to go through this. Some of the screensavers were meant to be configured. (view the /usr/share/applications/screensavers/glslideshow.desktop for confirmation of this)
Sorry for the bug spam - I'm just CCing myself on this ticket on the off chance that someone would actually fix this problem at one point.
Again sorry for the bug spam. I've been reading a lot about the configuration issue, and I think a lot of the problems aren't actually about configuration but about discoverability - The personal slideshow theme is a good example: when I wanted to use it, I didn't have a Pictures folder and my distro (Fedora 8) set the pictures folder to $HOME, which is a poor choice as a source for the personal slideshow. I had to search the internet to understand that the $HOME/Pictures is the default and it can be overridden using user-dirs. After investing a couple of hours I finally read the comment in the .desktop file for the personal slideshow theme: "Display a slideshow from your Pictures folder" It definitely can be expressed better, but if I had seen it before hand it would have been much easier for me to understand what Personal Slideshow does and how to get to show my pictures. The problem is that the comment isn't shown anywhere. It would probably be a good idea to show the comment in the screensaver select dialog somewhere. Under the preview is probably a good idea.
*** Bug 625537 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***