Created attachment 72516 [details] [review]
Make the browse and 'edit' mode background black

I really like how this looks.  It would be easy to add this as a preference, of course, but first we should discuss if this should become the default/only option.

Created attachment 72517 [details]
Screenshot showing the patch in use

This isn't the way this should be done, you should use te gtkstyle mechanism to do it.  You can make f-spot generate and read a custom gtkrc file.  This avoids potential conflicts with theme settings.  I have an old patch I wrote to do black backgrounds in image area I'll see if I can dig it up.  It's worth noting that f-spot had a dark gray color in the image area backgrounds in its early days and I changed it to respect the theme.  I'd lean towards making a custom dark theme just (jimmac and I worked on this for a while) rather than just overriding particular widgets.

I don't really like the black background (wouldn't improve usablity for me and it doesn't fit the rest of the application very well)

I remember screenshots of the dark-grey background, this looked better to me than the black.

Anyway, instead of just changing the color, I think the whole image display area should be reworked to be more like a nautilus folder view, supporting rubberbanding and stuff like that, also perhaps allowing a folder view for those who prefer showing the on-disk structure of the photo collection.

Attached is a dark gtkrc theme I have been using lately. 

You can apply it only for f-spot with:

`GTK2_RC_FILES=$HOME/.themes/DarkMist/gtk-2.0/gtkrc f-spot`

Created attachment 73214 [details]
Dark theme using the mist engine (clearlooks HEAD has a slight problem with gradients)

I forgot to note the gtkrc is work in progress. It doesn't work with the image preview which is still white. Also the text entry for comments is broken, and should be light.

Created attachment 73215 [details]
screenshot of the theme in action

r3865 allow custom theme loading