GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 519433
Unwanted comments added showing photo view date
Last modified: 2009-05-30 13:23:23 UTC
When I view a photo in gthumb, it creates a .comments subdirectory with a small xml file named after the photo file. The gthumb viewer shows the comment to be the view-date -- e.g. "17 February 2008". I never entered that comment, or any comment. I cannot find any way to disable this behavior. I don't want any .comments subdirectories to be created unless I explicitly type in a comment. Is this a bug? Thanks for your kind attention and for a great application. Other information: Debian Linux, GThumb 2.10.8
I can confirm this bad behavior with GThumb 2.11 (built from SVN trunk, revision 2486). The original problem is that GThumb always tries to “generate” a comment from a photo’s metadata if there is no explicit (XML) comment set. So, when viewing a file there is always a comment generated and that comment is then directly saved to a file. For me the generated comments always just contain a meanigless generic description from the Exif data, in particular the camera manufacturer name :-/ I’ll attach a very simple patch which turns this behavior off. I’m not sure whether it has any unwanted side effects but at least for me it appears to work. Manually adding comments is still possible. The comment view still shows the generated comment but it is not saved anymore automatically. Probably it would be even nicer if there was no comment shown at all; otherwise this might confuse users. On a side note: imho the current practice of mixing generated comments from Exif data with manually set comments is not really a good idea and should be reconsidered. Maybe the user could be given a means to manually take over an Exif comment, if desired. In the most cases the Exif comment will probably be useless, however, and should not be automatically used.
Created attachment 125652 [details] [review] patch which removes GThumb’s bad behavior as described above
Yes, we need a more elegant way reconcile the exif and xml metadata. I'm not sure what that method would be exactly, but the above patch isn't enough. Right now priority is given to the exif (or xmp, or iptc) metadata, which I think is basically good. Except that this is a problem when the exif data contains stupid generic comment data, like "Sony Camera X1234". Perhaps we could build a blacklist of generic phrases to ignore... Suggestions are welcome. - Mike
Fixed in trunk.