GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 310574
Remember save dialog's "browser for other folders" state
Last modified: 2009-02-27 19:57:20 UTC
Distribution/Version: Fedore Core 4 - open an image - choose File | Save - the save dialog control "Browse for other folders" is not selected - select the control, and choose a folder - click Save (and click through further saving related dialogs) - close the image - open another image - choose File | Save - the save dialog control "Browse for other folders" is again not selected I suggest making the save dialog remember the state of the "Browse for other folders" control across images. As it is, I need to click on the control every time I save an image. It seems to me that resetting the state of the dialog between images doesn't serve the in itself laudable goal of keeping dialogs simple.
I understand your request and we will consider it. But why would you have to use the "Browse for other folders" part of the dialog for every image you are saving? Usually you only need this every once in a while.
My work flow is as following: - open the next image from folder X - edit it - save it to folder Y (always the same folder), with name fooNN.png, where "NN" is incremented by one for each image, and "foo" is about 15 characters, and so not nice to type manually - start over So what I really want is to click on the name of the last file in the target directory and then edit the filename.
Perhaps you should consider to add a bookmark for folder Y then.
I have done so. I fail to see the relevance of a bookmark, though.
The bookmark shows up in the combo-box which is located in the permanent part of the dialog. That allows you to quickly navigate to the destination folder. Tab completion in the Save dialog helps you to fill in the common prefix of your filename. Anyway, the real problem here is your workflow or rather the fact that GIMP doesn't support this rather frequent operation of working on a set of images in folder A and saving them in folder B. Instead of doing workarounds in the file-chooser, we should think of a user interface that helps to perform this particular task. There should be a way to specify a set of input images that is being worked on one by one. In this mode of operation, the save file-chooser would open in the common destination folder by default.
Thanks for your tip of usage of the combo-box. That indeed solves my problem better than my own suggestion, although two more details would ease things further - if Gimp knew to suggest the correct destination directory rather than the source directory of the image in question; perhaps make it possible to set a default save directory for all images, and - if in the said combo box when I press a letter, the first entry that starts with that letter were automatically selected; this is clearly a gtk issue, so I'll check gtk's bugzilla about this I also fully agree with your analysis of the crux of the problem, but equally lack ideas about how to fix it. It sounds like a really hard problem, because I expect nobody's work flow is entirely systematic: one tends to skip some input files or load some twice, occasionally save some output file into a funny place or not at all etc. So making it maximally easy to use the Load and Save dialogs in work flows such as mine could be all that can be done.
The latter improvement idea above now appears to be on gtk's TODO list as bug 310931.
Well, let's assume we wanted to implement this feature. Thinking about it I ran into several inconsistencies that I don't seem to be able to solve. The point is that there isn't exactly one Save dialog. Instead each image can have a Save dialog associated with it. It would be rather confusing if all Save dialogs would expand/collapse synchronously, so what we actually want to do is to only look at this setting when the dialog is being created. But where to take the setting from then? Imagine there are images A, B and C opened. You have saved image A and didn't need the "Browse for other folders" part of the dialog. For image B, you expanded it. Then you used the Save dialog of image A again but again, didn't need to browse for a different folder. Now you want to save image C. What should the initial state of the dialog be?
I believe that by "this feature" you refer to remembering the "Browse for other folders" control's state across images. If so, I propose having both a global and per-image state for that. The global state would be preferably saved across Gimp invokations. Global is initialized to "not shown" when Gimp is installed. The per image state is unset for a new image. When a Save dialog is opened, if the per image state is unset, the global state is copied into it. When the dialog is closed, its state is copied to the global state. In other words, when a Save dialog is opened, the state of "Browse for other folders" control is the same as that of the Save dialog -- of any image of that Gimp installation -- that was last closed.
The state of new save dialogs depends on the state of the dialog associated with the last image that was closed? That sounds rather confusing. I don't think such behaviour would be in any way predictable. To the user this would most likely appear as random behaviour.
No: the state of new save dialogs depends on the state of the dialog last closed. Not of the dialog of the last image closed.
Just had a look at the GtkFileChooser API and I am afraid that this request is not implementable. There is simply no way the application could control the state of the "Browse for other folders" expander. It cannot even find out what state the expander is in. I will now reassign this report to GTK+ since there is nothing we can do about it.
It seems this bug is a duplicate of bug #153828
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 153828 ***