In the old gthumb when you saved a jpg image you were asked for the jpg parameters (quality and smoothing), and you were able to change them for every photo.

Now you aren't asked for those parameteres, and gthumb uses the values you saved in the preferences.

This seems to me dangerous.

Suppose you are using gthumb mainly to prepare photos for printing or exporting to facebook, and you set 80% quality in the preferences because you need to save bandwith.

In the case you want to save a better quality image, you need to remember you have set a low quality value in the preferences and go and change it before saving. If you don't remember to change the preferences value, you're screwed! you are loosing the quality of your photo.

I understand that the jpg quality window has been eliminated because it's quite annoying in everyday use, but now you have a situation where you can loose significant value of your photos.

I think the jpg quality value shouldn't be in the preferences.

How could gthumb behave?

The better thing would be to save the image with its jpg quality and smoothing values, asking them only when they aren't set (like when you are converting an image from png).

In order to permit the user to change that values, a checkbox could be presented in the save dialog to change the jpg (or other format) parameters. The checkbox label could be "change image settings", and should be unset by default. When the user set it, the jpg (or other format) parameters dialog is shown; if the checkbox is unset, the current values are used.

Alternatively, the checkbox label could be "mantain current image settings" and work the opposite way.

I think this is an important issue, which should be solved in the 2.12 release process.