GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 703907
Cannot choose picture in background settings
Last modified: 2013-10-04 06:49:55 UTC
Hello devs! Problem: Setting a custom image as desktop wallpaper takes too many clicks and unobvious UX. Expected: Settings->Wallpaper [->Pictures]->"Choose file" and "Choose aspect". Rationale: In this report I try to transcribe how frustrating the UX was in this case, the tone might sound a bit harsh, but I tried to keep it productive. Using Fedora 19 here (skipped Fedora 18) I wasted quite some time finding how I could change the background. This alone seems incredible. The obvious procedure (settings->background) wasn't actually straightforward. I didn't understand straight away that I had to do yet another click on that image button to access to the actual background-setting panel (why-o-why?). I reached that panel, clicked on "Pictures" and there was no way to select the picture I wanted ( pow(incredible,2); ) only a set of random pictures. In 3.4 there was a "+" and "-" button which were perfect. So this panel ended up being useless. Finally I killed the applet, went in Files, found my pic and right clicked "set as wallpaper". Hurray! To me, there is clearly a flaw in the process. I read somewhere that the "Pictures" panel actually show ~/Pictures (BTW it isn't the case, I believe it shows a wallpaper directory maintained by Gnome).. What if my file layout doesn't match this? As a user I don't want to copy files around just for a wallpaper, or worse, create symlinks. What if my image is nested in some subdir? I see others suggest to show most recent pictures there (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682126). This might make it up for 50% of the use cases, don't throw away the 50% of the use cases. Also DnD (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689351) is fine if you already have the background setting panel AND a file manager open. But making this the ONLY way to set single images is not reasonable. As a user I fire up the specific app to set a background which requires me to open another app to select the image I want and drop it onto the first app? What? Exploring recursively a specified (optionnaly non-standard) directory should be at best optional! (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689375) I have thousands of pictures under a large directory tree! Slow and useless in this case. The user knows exactly what image he wants so give him a way to choose it or if the way is the file manager, get rid of that Pictures panel. Or replace it with a file selector widget which only shows image files + directories and recent wallpapers. Or simply rollback the applet to 3.4, which covered so many use cases. I'm happy with Gnome, other DMs feel weird. However, this time (3.8) it feels like some places have been "over-designed" like we -developpers- sometimes "over-engineer" our code. The loss of split-pane view is another dramatic (really!) example but this is another topic (and yes, I know there is Nemo, but I like the out of the box spirit of Gnome). Hum, re-read all this and it seems like a very long report for something as trivial as "wallpaper selection" ;) My 2 dollars, Daniel
*** Bug 703982 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
You'll want to test with GNOME 3.10. Linking to other bugs isn't going to help get this fixed.
I've just done that using the gnome 3.10 live CD. Here are my comments (sorry if the language is odd, English is not my first language). The image buttons on the first page of the background setting panel now make more sense since there are two of them: one for my background and one for the locked screen. So I'm now fine with them. Past the image button, there is the panel where one chooses his background. To quickly get an image I just did a screen capture that went directly to ~/Pictures as a PNG. I did another one and put it in a subdirectory of ~/Pictures. Issues: - Unsupported PNGs? They never showed up in the "Pictures" tab which kept telling me to put images into ~/Pictures. Converting them to JPG made the one in ~/Pictures appear. I suspect this is just a small bug somewhere. - Subdirectories are not listed (which is bad... or good... see below) nor explored recursively (which is good! see first post). - I couldn't choose an image from a file chooser (which is bad). Workaround: - Right clicking on the image in nautilus and selecting "use as wallpaper" made it work fine, even with PNG files. Ideas: - support PNG ;) - If the idea is to only show images from ~/Pictures, listing subdirectories alongside the images would be nice. In other words, let the pane that shows the pictures be a file chooser widget restricted to ~/Pictures and its subdirs and which only lists known image formats. This covers the case where the user has his images in the "~/Pictures" directory. But that is not always the case. - Personally I'd prefer that you keep that pane that lists already used wallpapers as it is and add back the two "+" and "-" buttons that let the user choose the image he wanted wherever it may be in his folder/drives layout. As found in 3.4. Then if Gnome needs to copy it to a specific "wallpaper folder", its ok, as long as the user doesn't need to do it manually. This covers all cases of layouts. Actually, the way it worked in 3.4 was good for me. What was the reason for changing this? Status: - Currently, "Nautilus > Right Click on Image > Set As Wallpaper" is still the most flexible way to get the image one wants on the background. Daniel PS: the "linking to other bugs" is meant as an equivalent to "citing references in publications". It should inform you that I did some research and that I don't state things without some background. Furthermore I don't simply link to them but criticize them too, in a (hopefully) constructive way. They are nothing close to random links to other bugs.
(In reply to comment #3) > I've just done that using the gnome 3.10 live CD. Here are my comments (sorry > if the language is odd, English is not my first language). > > The image buttons on the first page of the background setting panel now make > more sense since there are two of them: one for my background and one for the > locked screen. So I'm now fine with them. > > Past the image button, there is the panel where one chooses his background. To > quickly get an image I just did a screen capture that went directly to > ~/Pictures as a PNG. I did another one and put it in a subdirectory of > ~/Pictures. > > Issues: > - Unsupported PNGs? They never showed up in the "Pictures" tab which kept > telling me to put images into ~/Pictures. Converting them to JPG made the one > in ~/Pictures appear. I suspect this is just a small bug somewhere. Screenshots are ignored, because they make for awful backgrounds. > - Subdirectories are not listed (which is bad... or good... see below) nor > explored recursively (which is good! see first post). > - I couldn't choose an image from a file chooser (which is bad). > > Workaround: > - Right clicking on the image in nautilus and selecting "use as wallpaper" > made it work fine, even with PNG files. > > Ideas: > - support PNG ;) > - If the idea is to only show images from ~/Pictures, listing subdirectories > alongside the images would be nice. In other words, let the pane that shows the > pictures be a file chooser widget restricted to ~/Pictures and its subdirs and > which only lists known image formats. This covers the case where the user has > his images in the "~/Pictures" directory. But that is not always the case. > - Personally I'd prefer that you keep that pane that lists already used > wallpapers as it is and add back the two "+" and "-" buttons that let the user > choose the image he wanted wherever it may be in his folder/drives layout. As > found in 3.4. Then if Gnome needs to copy it to a specific "wallpaper folder", > its ok, as long as the user doesn't need to do it manually. This covers all > cases of layouts. Actually, the way it worked in 3.4 was good for me. What was > the reason for changing this? Pretty much everything there is covered by bug 682126, so closing as a dupe. > Status: > - Currently, "Nautilus > Right Click on Image > Set As Wallpaper" is still > the most flexible way to get the image one wants on the background. Or from the image viewer as mentioned in the help for the background panel. > Daniel > PS: the "linking to other bugs" is meant as an equivalent to "citing references > in publications". It should inform you that I did some research and that I > don't state things without some background. Furthermore I don't simply link to > them but criticize them too, in a (hopefully) constructive way. They are > nothing close to random links to other bugs. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 682126 ***