... sigh... Let me explain this again.

Difference between Save and Save As... and Export and Export As... is only one - The latter ALWAYS prompts for a name, the former prompts for name once if its a new file and not again, overwriting the file previously saved or loaded silently. this is a long standing tradtion in software. Save an Export separation itself is a result of moving twoars separating destructive and nondestructive actions. Save is "safe" and always keeps everthing you can see in GIMP UI - you can continue editing from it. Export is always destructive. No other format than XCF supports all gimp features.

This separation is not up for negotiation. There are workarounds in form of scripts that re-enable the possibly destructive workflows. Feel free to use them. The workflows will not be supported in vanilla gimp.

:)

-- Stratadrake
strata_ranger@hotmail.com
--------------------
Numbers may not lie, but neither do they tell the whole truth.

Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:19:55 +0000 From: v_cadet@yahoo.fr
To: gimp-developer-list@gnome.org
Subject: [Gimp-developer] Re : Feedback from an ordinary user

--- En date de : Ven 16.11.12, Ali Carikcioglu a écrit :

Hello everyone,
First of all, I want to thank all developers for making this great program GIMP. And I have some improvement suggestions about GIMP.

...

6) Combine Save As and Export buttons: Click Save As and, save as jpg, is not possible. I think Save As and Export serve the same purpose and can be combined.

Hello Ali et al.

I have the exact same concern about the save function(s). IMHO there are 5, too many of them, which most probably confuses users (I was as to the «export as» function). From what I have understood, correct me if I'm wrong:

Six, actually. Save / Save As / Save a Copy for XCF files, Overwrite / Export / Export As for standard image formats. (And why Overwrite and Export should be separate commands at all is a design issue I personally do not agree with.)

"Save a copy" and both the "export" functions play the same role on the user's perspective: the working project remains "dirty".

Precisely. I have brought this up before on the mailing list (to mixed responses), "Save a Copy" WAS the 2.6 version of "Export" so now that Export is officially a separate command "Save a Copy" is of such limited use (depending on your workflow) that there is no point in having it anymore and it could be easily combined under Export. As noted, neither command cleans the save state of the open project so it should not be GIMP's job to mandate that you can't "export" an XCF to disk.

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În data de Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:32:55 +0200, Alexia Death a scris:

[...] Save is "safe" and always keeps everthing you can see in GIMP UI - you can continue editing from it. Export is always destructive. No other format than XCF supports all gimp features.

Just curious: assuming I open an existing .png file, either do nothing or just crop to some smaller dimension, then export it again as .png file format. What is destructive in this case from the file type perspective ? (your statement about export being *always* destructive)

Should I understand that in the exported version GIMP will alter somehow the original .png file structure so that it becomes "destructive" ?

Cristi

Cristian Secară
http://www.secarica.ro

* Cristian Secară [11-24-12 16:08]:

În data de Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:32:55 +0200, Alexia Death a scris:

[...] Save is "safe" and always keeps everthing you can see in GIMP UI - you can continue editing from it. Export is always destructive. No other format than XCF supports all gimp features.

Just curious: assuming I open an existing .png file, either do nothing or just crop to some smaller dimension, then export it again as .png file format. What is destructive in this case from the file type perspective ? (your statement about export being *always* destructive)

Should I understand that in the exported version GIMP will alter somehow the original .png file structure so that it becomes "destructive" ?

Certainly, the file-save operation *usually* uses the same file-name in which case you have lost your original and it is un-recoverable.

(paka)Patrick Shanahan       Plainfield, Indiana, USA      HOG # US1244711
http://wahoo.no-ip.org        Photo Album: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/gallery2
http://en.opensuse.org                           openSUSE Community Member
Registered Linux User #207535                    @ http://linuxcounter.net

El 25/11/12 10:57, Cristian Secară escribió:

That I know, but I was referring to Alexia's statement about anything except XCF being destructive. That statement was about file format, or so I understand.

If I crop something and either save as XCF or export as PNG (or other lossless format versus the original), of course the cropping action itself is destructive, but the file format makes no difference *in this case*. Saving as XCF does not save also the original and an operation history, for example, so what is the point in saying that export is always destructive ?

Or maybe there is really something I am unaware of ?

Cristi

Oh, I see. You're right, the cropping operation in this case is destructive, independent of the output format. A scaling operation, any filter to the image would be destructive too, and the XCF won't store the original data.
However, as far as I know, this change (save/export) is one of the first steps towards non-destructive editing and in the future GIMP will store every action performed as a GEGL operation non-destructively. When that happens the images you open will be actually "imported" in the node tree, and from that point every operation won't be destructive, so storing the XCF (or whatever format GIMP uses at that point) will be the only non-destructive option, while the rest of the formats will be destructive.

That's what I understood from Peter Sikking's blogposts and from comments in this list and in the IRC channel. Please let me know if this isn't correct.

Gez

On 11/25/2012 04:59 AM, Cristian Secară wrote:

În data de Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:32:55 +0200, Alexia Death a scris:

[...] Save is "safe" and always keeps everthing you can see in GIMP UI - you can continue editing from it. Export is always destructive. No other format than XCF supports all gimp features.

Just curious: assuming I open an existing .png file, either do nothing or just crop to some smaller dimension, then export it again as .png file format. What is destructive in this case from the file type perspective ? (your statement about export being *always* destructive)

Should I understand that in the exported version GIMP will alter somehow the original .png file structure so that it becomes "destructive" ?

Cristi

.. but "Save" is not a "safe" term also and not very explicit - our (new) user will think he will save changes he made to his file, NOT the fact that he will save his file as XCF - so the problem which may arise for some new users is the fact they expect to get a modified JPG or PNG file as a direct action of "Save" not a new "GIMP Project file".

"Save file as Project" or "Save as a GIMP project" - those words make a clear sense for the user about what will happen. My proposal is to change "Save" in something which will point very clear about the creation of a "source" or "project" file -

"Overwrite .." is ok because the filename and action are indicated, no need for guessing.

For complex programs such GIMP or Photoshop the plain word (and the plain notion) of (just) "Save" is not as usable as a clearly defined action.

For any computer software which have a GUI, description of controls should reflect the exact action which will happen when that control is used.

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 10:32 AM, Alexia Death wrote:

... sigh... Let me explain this again.

Yes, we're all shaking our heads.

(I was bitten by the smarmy 'you're wrong! I know what you want to do, but I'll not do it!' dialog several times tonight alone... nothing like re-navigating through stacks of directories from scratch after the 'Ha ha' message. I laugh along every time.)

I understand that the devs want to move toward a totally nondestructive editor. I want to see that happen myself.

That doesn't mean needlessly trading efficiency and long-standing experience with the most common workflow for... something that won't be here for a long time. 99% of the time I open Gimp, I couldn't care less about a project file. I grumble every time the project file is pushed on me. I almost never want it, and still won't even later when Gimp blossoms into its nondestructive butterflyness.

So please, for the love of god, change the 'fuck you' dialog to something that doesn't slap the user instead of doing what the user wants, expects, and the code is perfectly capable of doing. e.g. an explanation, an 'I know what I'm doing' button (preferably with a 'don't show this again' checkbox that also makes the 'unsaved changes' warnings go away).

The conceptual distinction between save [project] and export is real enough. However, the UI as set up now is obstructionist for no gain.

Blaming the users with a big sigh and eye-roll isn't a strategy for long-term success. I tried it for a long time myself, it's not really a great plan.

Monty

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 5:31 PM, Monty Montgomery wrote:

So please, for the love of god, change the 'fuck you' dialog to something that doesn't slap the user instead of doing what the user wants, expects, and the code is perfectly capable of doing.

Could you please for the love of any deity stop overreacting and pretending like free software developers are personal slaves of users? As a free software developer yourself surely you don't do everything people tell you to.

Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 06:51:56PM +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 5:31 PM, Monty Montgomery wrote:

So please, for the love of god, change the 'fuck you' dialog to something that doesn't slap the user instead of doing what the user wants, expects, and the code is perfectly capable of doing.

Could you please for the love of any deity stop overreacting and pretending like free software developers are personal slaves of users? As a free software developer yourself surely you don't do everything people tell you to.

This has been discussed to death already, but given that there are so many users who cared enough to ask on gimp-developer, can we revisit the file-saving UI design and provide an option for what-they-want?

There are many users who are asking for the old style saving as an option. We hear them out and this discussion which keeps coming back again and again is a bit annoying, but do they influence us to give them what they want?

Disagreement is a strong sign of a healthy project, and the fact that users are protesting strongly is better not taken as an order to do work for them, but rather as support that they care about GIMP as their own project, something that they use every day and don't want it to be taken away from them.

[e.g., I strongly disliked that GNOME3 changed the desktop UI. I got it for free, but GNOME3 was something different from what I had and wanted to continue having. I got it for free, but I was upset that I lost it - nevermind the fork that has arrived since. I had to switch to a different desktop which was closer to what I wanted than GNOME3, and GNOME3 developers could care less, but they lost me though I am not worth any money to them.]

Though a democratic process is no substitute for a scientific process (and maybe UI design is scientific, who knows?), in this case we must pay heed to our users. UI is very dear to computer users, and sometimes a perfect way isn't what users want. No pre-designed replacement for some 'X' is going to be better than an 'X' that evolved into what users wanted or were familiar with. We cannot satisfy everyone, but we should give some thought to introducing the old behavior as an option.

Mukund

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Mukund Sivaraman wrote:

Though a democratic process is no substitute for a scientific process (and maybe UI design is scientific, who knows?), in this case we must pay heed to our users.

Democracy is overrated :)

Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

On 11/28/2012 05:12 PM, Mukund Sivaraman wrote:

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 06:51:56PM +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 5:31 PM, Monty Montgomery wrote:

So please, for the love of god, change the 'fuck you' dialog to something that doesn't slap the user instead of doing what the user wants, expects, and the code is perfectly capable of doing.

Could you please for the love of any deity stop overreacting and pretending like free software developers are personal slaves of users? As a free software developer yourself surely you don't do everything people tell you to.

This has been discussed to death already, but given that there are so many users who cared enough to ask on gimp-developer, can we revisit the file-saving UI design and provide an option for what-they-want?

There are many users who are asking for the old style saving as an option. We hear them out and this discussion which keeps coming back again and again is a bit annoying, but do they influence us to give them what they want?

Disagreement is a strong sign of a healthy project, and the fact that users are protesting strongly is better not taken as an order to do work for them, but rather as support that they care about GIMP as their own project, something that they use every day and don't want it to be taken away from them.

[e.g., I strongly disliked that GNOME3 changed the desktop UI. I got it for free, but GNOME3 was something different from what I had and wanted to continue having. I got it for free, but I was upset that I lost it - nevermind the fork that has arrived since. I had to switch to a different desktop which was closer to what I wanted than GNOME3, and GNOME3 developers could care less, but they lost me though I am not worth any money to them.]

Though a democratic process is no substitute for a scientific process (and maybe UI design is scientific, who knows?), in this case we must pay heed to our users. UI is very dear to computer users, and sometimes a perfect way isn't what users want. No pre-designed replacement for some 'X' is going to be better than an 'X' that evolved into what users wanted or were familiar with. We cannot satisfy everyone, but we should give some thought to introducing the old behavior as an option.

Maybe a plugin or a patch can do the job? The Gnome3 devs added extensions support, and afaik some people got something similar to G2 or at least usable for them.

BTW, the Gnome guys have a great plugin installation system, something Gimp lacks... Could such feature be added to version 2.10 or 2.12?

Or maybe a Gimp Plugin Manager will do the trick?

Cheers, Dima

Could you please for the love of any deity stop overreacting

As a free software developer yourself surely you don't do everything people tell you to.

Connect the two. So, "no".

This change pisses me off quite a lot as a day to day user. It's not overreacting to say so. I realize the devs care more about their vision than how I feel about it, but there's nothing 'overreacting' about it.

It's been discussed to death and will continue being discussed to death because many users don't like it. How dare we say so!

Monty

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine

Democracy is overrated :)

Agreed. But despots get their feedback primarily through overripe fruit... and revolutions.

The save/export decision is boneheaded, stubborn, condescending, and obviously wrong. Not in concept, but in implementation. This thread started up again because even a novice could see that.

Monty

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 5:10 AM, Monty Montgomery wrote:

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine

Democracy is overrated :)

Agreed. But despots get their feedback primarily through overripe fruit... and revolutions.

Revolutions? :D

So far it looks rather like "I'm going to be your PITA until you give in".

That's more like terrorism. And I'm not falling for that, my friend.

Alexandre Prokoudine http://libregraphicsworld.org

On Thu, 29 Nov 2012 05:30:35 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 5:10 AM, Monty Montgomery wrote:

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Alexandre Prokoudine

Democracy is overrated :)

Agreed. But despots get their feedback primarily through overripe fruit... and revolutions.

Revolutions? :D

So far it looks rather like "I'm going to be your PITA until you give in".

That's more like terrorism. And I'm not falling for that, my friend.

All right, let's stop this nonsense.

You have every right to do what you please with GIMP. By the same token, other people have a right to complain. And in this situation, where so many people are complaining so vociferously, you *could* decide to take a closer look at your assumptions.

I've read your vision statement. It's fine. I have no basic quarrel with it. But your execution, frankly, sucks. You've gone out of your way to try to force everyone, no matter what their needs or how they work, to embrace your vision of images being "projects", where you always want to work in the loss-free form and only export the result at the end into a portable image format.

There are plenty of cases where that's fine. If I've carefully built a large panorama, and want to do major work on it, that's exactly what I do. Five years ago I put maybe 100 hours of work into this panorama (http://rlk.smugmug.com/Other/Landscapes/4851912_XB4SmT#!i=450968307&k=29fQmfW), and you'd better believe I did all the work in XCF format. I put a tremendous amount of work into cleaning it up, getting the sky just right without doing anything to the foliage nearby, and I used a lot of layers, which was an extremely painful process on the single core with 2 GB that I had at the time. And I have a lot of other panoramas there where I've done a lot of work (none as much as that). Some of them I did in XCF format, some in TIFF when I didn't need to use layers. Those are projects.

But there are plenty of times I'm just interested in fairly minor tweaking of an image for use as a web graphic or whatnot, and the whole business of having to export rather than save, and then get nagged to save even when I'm quite positive I'm never going to need to do anything else, or if I do, I can accept the data loss (the fact that XCF still is 8-bit only makes it even less tempting to go through all the effort). I don't need GIMP to hold my hand through the damn crosswalk. I've done enough image editing over the years to have developed judgment about when I need to take my image editing seriously and when I don't. If I open a JPEG file and want to save it back out as a JPEG, I know what I'm doing. Maybe you don't think so, but I do. These are not "projects". They're quick and dirty one-offs. I use GIMP because I know it. I don't want to go through the bother of learning a different tool just to edit images I don't want to turn into full-blown projects. It's not efficient.

So if I have to support a fork by someone who's going to take users' needs more seriously, I will. I'd rather not, because this is a trivial issue. But it's a very, very annoying one.

Robert Krawitz                                     

MIT VI-3 1987 - Congratulations MIT Engineers men's hoops Final Four!
Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 6:41 AM, Robert Krawitz wrote:

All right, let's stop this nonsense.

After reading that I honestly expected that it's going to end at...

You have every right to do what you please with GIMP.

But no, it hasn't :)

You've gone out of your way to try to force everyone...

Who are you and what have you done to Robert Krawitz, developer of Gutenprint? Show me where you buried his bones. I'd like to pay the last tribute to a great mind that succumbed to the nonsensical notion that free software developers can or wish to enforce anything on anybody.

If I
open a JPEG file and want to save it back out as a JPEG, I know what I'm doing. Maybe you don't think so, but I do. These are not "projects". They're quick and dirty one-offs. I use GIMP because I know it. I don't want to go through the bother of learning a different tool just to edit images I don't want to turn into full-blown projects. It's not efficient.

And you don't have to. Overwrite and be done with it. You'll have to find a good explanation why I cut about a hundred of screenshots yesterday (basically, open, crop, overwrite - nothing fancier) without yelling at GIMP. After all, isn't that exactly the kind of simple editing for which people are reluctant to learn a new tool? Could it be that I'm used to closing images in a batch of 20 images or so? :)

I can see how dealing with the warning dialog at the closing step could be a wee bit annoying for someone who works om many _heavy_ images (which means lots of memory used by GIMP), _and_ I publicly said that better ideas are welcome (at least by me). Now, don't pretend you didn't read it. You did. And so far I've mostly seen "just gimme a goddamn option" kind of reaction, with few (admirable) exceptions.

Noone said it isn't possible to tweak few things within the project's vision. In fact we already tweaked some of them to meet requests from users. Does http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?h=gimp-2-8&id=062d38d141907d095b92e7a1adc05cd1bc870be2 ring a bell? What about
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?h=gimp-2-8&id=c3e904fab1b29224b7dd55bb5b4af49f34c3b335 ?

Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org

On Thu, 29 Nov 2012 06:13:05 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 6:41 AM, Robert Krawitz wrote:

All right, let's stop this nonsense.

After reading that I honestly expected that it's going to end at...

You have every right to do what you please with GIMP.

But no, it hasn't :)

You've gone out of your way to try to force everyone...

Who are you and what have you done to Robert Krawitz, developer of Gutenprint? Show me where you buried his bones. I'd like to pay the last tribute to a great mind that succumbed to the nonsensical notion that free software developers can or wish to enforce anything on anybody.

:-)

If I
open a JPEG file and want to save it back out as a JPEG, I know what I'm doing. Maybe you don't think so, but I do. These are not "projects". They're quick and dirty one-offs. I use GIMP because I know it. I don't want to go through the bother of learning a different tool just to edit images I don't want to turn into full-blown projects. It's not efficient.

And you don't have to. Overwrite and be done with it. You'll have to find a good explanation why I cut about a hundred of screenshots yesterday (basically, open, crop, overwrite - nothing fancier) without yelling at GIMP. After all, isn't that exactly the kind of simple editing for which people are reluctant to learn a new tool? Could it be that I'm used to closing images in a batch of 20 images or so? :)

In what format?

I can see how dealing with the warning dialog at the closing step could be a wee bit annoying for someone who works om many _heavy_ images (which means lots of memory used by GIMP), _and_ I publicly said that better ideas are welcome (at least by me). Now, don't pretend you didn't read it. You did. And so far I've mostly seen "just gimme a goddamn option" kind of reaction, with few (admirable) exceptions.

Maybe because people really, really want an option to at least just save back to the original file or original format without any nagging?

Noone said it isn't possible to tweak few things within the project's vision. In fact we already tweaked some of them to meet requests from users. Does http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?h=gimp-2-8&id=062d38d141907d095b92e7a1adc05cd1bc870be2 ring a bell? What about
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/commit/?h=gimp-2-8&id=c3e904fab1b29224b7dd55bb5b4af49f34c3b335

Neither of these address what I (and many others) see as the real problem. I want a workflow where I can open a JPEG file, edit it, and save it right back without having to go through a dialog, and where I'll get warned if I try to exit or close the image without saving it back.

Robert Krawitz                                     

MIT VI-3 1987 - Congratulations MIT Engineers men's hoops Final Four!
Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom  --  http://ProgFree.org
Project lead for Gutenprint   --    http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton

Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

As a free software developer yourself surely you don't do everything people tell you to.

No, but I find rather a lot of time, if someone (never mind a whole bunch of people!) is bothered enough to post a comment to my mailing list, that they have a point worth understanding and acknowledging.
Even simple things like a misunderstanding often mean that my documentation isn't good enough.

No doubt there are two different workflows for an image editing program, what I would call new/import/export/save, and open/edit/save workflows. The clever thing is to have a plan to make both of them work well.

Graeme Gill.