Usage of comment field in export dialogs and how to improve it
This is a write up to collect my findings about the current usage of the comment field in export dialogs in GIMP master and hopefully get some ideas from others about the best way to improve this. This is mainly based on tests with the jpeg export dialog but the other export dialogs should have similar behavior.
Current situation in master
For saving comments in the jpeg export dialog there is:
- a checkbox to select whether or not comments should be saved in the exported image.
- an edit control where the current comment is shown which can be edited.
Known problems
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Besides saving the comment in the exported image if the save comment checkbox is enabled, the comment currently is always saved to the opened GIMP image too, even if the save comment checkbox is disabled.
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Synchronizing the comment with the several places in metadata is not always working yet but I'm working on some patches for this. The thing is it seems that different users have different ideas about which metadata tags to synchronize with and we do not really have room in the export dialog to add a lot of extra check boxes.
For now I will concentrate mostly on point 1. In my opinion an export dialog should relate to settings and changes used only in the exported image. The way we do it at the moment is inconsistent from a user interface viewpoint.
We need to decide what the best thing to do here is.
Possible options
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Remove comment editing from the export dialog and let the user edit comments in GIMP's main user interface. Currently this is done in Image -> Image Properties -> Comment tab (which has it's own problems to be discussed at another time. See: #9302).
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Allow comment editing in the export dialog but only save it in the exported image and only if save comment checkbox is checked, do not save it in the currently opened image. In this case we need to make clear to the user that the comment entered here is only for the exported image.
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Allow comment editing in the export dialog and save it in the exported image only if save comment checkbox is checked. Also save the comment in the currently opened image, also only if the save comment checkbox is checked.
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Keep the current situation where comment is exported depending on the save comment checkbox but always save to the open GIMP image.
My own preferences based on my ideas of what a consistent user interface is would be either 1 or 2. Between those two I have a slight preference for 1. I would think most users only rarely need to change the comment and only very rarely would want it different between exported image and GIMP image. Changing the comment in the main GIMP ui in the comment tab of the image properties then sounds like a better place to do that than an export dialog.
We could even separate it in its own comment editing dialog or add it to the metadata editor, in which case we could also add options for the metadata tags with which the comment should be synchronized with.