← Back to context

Comment by bstar77

4 years ago

This is a weird hill to die on. I've never cared much about the file picker and the individual file preview is "good enough" to ensure you pick the correct file. Now if Nautilus didn't have image previews in "icon view", then that's cause for rioting in the streets.

26 comments

bstar77

Reply
weberer  4 years ago

That just tells me that you never upload images, or that your image folder is not particularly large. If trackpad drivers were broken, that would still be a pretty big issue, even though you personally always use a mouse.

  • cowtools  4 years ago

    I upload files all the time and for some reason I don't encounter this problem in gnome. Just give the files appropriate names?

    Seems like a channer problem. It's not suprising that no one from /g/ has made a patch yet.

    Edit: Actually, I just checked and apparently it's because the file picker actually does show thumbnail icons, just very small ones. For example, https://files.catbox.moe/h3s3c3.png

    I guess I can usually make out what the image is from the small thumbnail icons!

    • true_religion  4 years ago

      Thumbnails in your file picker are table stakes at this point.

      Everyone has a cell phone capable of holding thousands of images, most of which won't get an appropriate title.

      For example, I'm tiling a bathroom now. It was very easy to just take dozens pictures of tiles send them off for approval, and get the top five back for a further price check. That entire workflow was enabled by thumbnails. If we had to check the filename of each image we were sending, it would have slowed things down immensely.

    • compiler-guy  4 years ago

      “Appropriate file names”?

      grand-canyon-001.jpg grand-canyon-002.jpg grand-canyon-003.jpg grand-canyon-004.jpg … grand-canyon-991.jpg

      Or maybe

      grand-canyon-east.jpg grand-canyon-west.jpg grand-canyon-north.jpg grand-canyon-south.jpg … grand-canyon-northeast.jpg

      Thumbnails solve real problems and other guis have had this as a completely solved problem since literally the mid-nineties.

      6 replies →

    • imwillofficial  4 years ago

      Seeing the picture you want to upload is a channer problem?

      You guess you just use proper file names?

      This attitude is EXACTLY what the author is describing, and why Linux on the desktops fails to take hold.

      4 replies →

    • MatmaRex  4 years ago

      Consider reading the linked post, the author includes screenshots identical to yours and explains that that is not what they mean.

    • robonerd  4 years ago

      > Seems like a channer problem.

      Whether you like 4chan or think anybody who goes there is the devil incarnate, using 4chan as your excuse for dismissing such basic functionality as thumbnails in a file picker is deranged. Why not abolish file pickers entirely, since 4chan uses it? In fact lets ban drinking water too, I hear nazis like to drink it. Ban air too, we wouldn't want anybody using it to say something hateful. Is there any insanity "but 4chan exists!" can't be used to justify?

      3 replies →

petepete  4 years ago

You'd expect the file picker and nautilus to share behaviour though, right? Also for me, if I open the file picker from Chrome/Edge/an Electron app it's forced full screen and there's no preview on the right either.

I love GNOME, use it on both desktop and laptop, but this is one of those things that's just bad.

  • bstar77  4 years ago

    I definitely agree that it's strange that Nautilus can do this and the file picker can't. I also agree that consistency is important, but this issue has never caused me problems so I don't think anything of it. There are other things in Gnome that are keeping me from using it after being a vocal supporter for decades.

    • cowtools  4 years ago

      I think the difference is that GtkFilePicker is a part of the running GTK program, like firefox for example. If you wanted to get all of nautilus' features, you would have to embed all of nautilus into your program, including features that would be innapropriate fir a file picker

      Maybe instead of just using GtkFilePicker on linux, it should first check if there's an available "xdg-file-picker" in the environment, which gnome sets to nautilus with some flags to run it in file-picker mode.

      1 reply →