GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 624469
Appearance of f-spot should be optimized, and the option to select a theme should be removed
Last modified: 2018-07-01 08:54:22 UTC
Right now, there is an option to change the theme that f-spot uses in its display. This is an interesting concept, but it gives users too much control over something that they shouldn't have to figure out. When I didn't know anything about photo management, this option baffled me - Why would this one program have such an unusual option? Now that I know a bit more, I realize that it must be there so a dark theme can be selected. I suggest that instead of giving users this power, a dark theme should simply be selected and optimized from the start (most of the themes on my system look bad in f-spot anyway), and the options should be moved to the gconf-editor, where the truly geeky can find them. In this way, the best color can be dictated (and optimized) by those who know such things, and for those that REALLY care, they can go and adjust things in a slightly hackish location. In the mean time, lay users, get the best color settings, and aren't confused by a setting that doesn't mean something to them.
The problem with selecting another theme is that the UI look & feel will be different then as a theme does not consists only of colors, but of (often weird) colors for selected items and different look & feel of controls. So I would not select a dark theme by default. I am not even sure if I would set the neutral gray background per default. Non-fotographic users, who just want to manage their tons of party and travel snapshots, maybe would prefer a system theme specific background, not a f-spot custom one. You compared f-spot to Adobe (LR?) in the mailing list, but considering features and audience we should compare it to Windows Live Photo Gallery rather, which uses a white background. XnView allows to configure the background. Adobe Photoshop Album uses a light gray color, Lightroom uses a very dark background color. And so on. Well, I would prefer it configurable. Not only the theme, but the background color itsself. But personally I am happy with the gray. At least for now.
Here's how I think we should solve this: GTK+ now has support for dark themes, which are basically a color scheme variation of your current theme. We should use that (jimmac pointed this out to me). Ideally we'd remove the theme selector (it's so wrong) and just have a (enabled by default) option: "Use dark colors". You can always disable it if you don't like it and go back to the default theme look. That way we have two options: clean normal theme and a clean dark theme, as the designer intended it.
That sounds about ideal, and sounds like a good commonground between Paul and my concerns.
Yes, this sounds great.
Clearing the milestone for now, this depends on GTK+ 3.0, so I have no idea when that will happen.
f-spot is not under active development anymore, has not seen code changes for five years, and saw its last tarball release in the year 2010. Its codebase has been archived: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Archive/f-spot/commits/master Closing this report as WONTFIX as part of Bugzilla Housekeeping to reflect reality. Please feel free to reopen this ticket (or rather transfer the project to GNOME Gitlab, as GNOME Bugzilla is deprecated) if anyone takes the responsibility for active development again.