GNOME Photos 3.24.0

After exploring new territory with sharing and non-destructive editing over the last two releases, it was time for some introspection. We looked at some of the long-standing problems within our existing feature set and tried to iron out a few of them.

Overview Grids

It was high time that we overhauled our old GtkIconView-based overview grids. Their inability to reflow the thumbnails leads to a an ugly vertical gutter of empty space unless the window is just the right size. The other problem was performance. GtkIconView gets extremely slow when the icons are updated, which usually happens when content is detected for the first time and start getting thumbnailed.

Fixing this has been a recurrent theme in Photos since the middle of the previous development cycle. The end goal was to use a GtkFlowBox-based grid, but it involved a lot more work than replacing one user interface component with another.
Too many things relied on the existence of a GtkTreeModel, and had to be ported to our custom GListModel implementation before we could achieve any user-visible improvement. Once all those yaks had been shaved, we finally started working on the widget at the Core Apps Hackfest last year.

Anyway, I am happy that all that effort has to come fruition now.

Thumbnails

Closely related to our overview grids are the thumbnails inside them. Photos has perpetually suffered from GIO’s inability to let an application specifically request a high resolution thumbnail. While that is definitely a fixable problem, the fact that we store our edits non-destructively as serialized GEGL graphs makes it very hard to use the desktop-wide infrastructure for thumbnails. One cannot expect a generic thumbnailer to interpret the edits and apply them to the original image because their representation will vary greatly from one application to another. That led to the other problem where the thumbnails wouldn’t reflect the edited state of an image.

Therefore, starting from version 3.24.0, Photos has its own out-of-process thumbnailer and a separate thumbnail cache. They ensure that the thumbnails are of a suitably high resolution, and the edited state of an image is never ignored.

Exposure and Blacks

Personally, I have been a heavy user of Darktable’s exposure and blacks adjustment tool, and I really missed something like that in GNOME Photos. Ultimately, at this year’s WilberWeek I fixed gegl:exposure to imitate its Darktable counterpart, and exposed it as a tool in Photos. I am happy with the outcome and I have so far enjoyed dogfooding this little addition.