freedesktop thumbnail spec: modification proposal, central development

[Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak]

On 08/07/2009 06:24 AM, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Dear xdg list,
>
> I originally wrote this email to Jens Finke and Olivier Sessink (CC),
> since both of them wrote the freedesktop.org thumbnail spec. However,
> none of them replied so I'm sending it here.
>
> The current thumbnail spec [1] is problematic because it proposed to put
> all thumbnails of a certain category (for instance "normal") into one
...
> Do you plan any such modifications? The fact that the spec is not hosted
> on freedesktop.org seems to be a bit unexpected, too. Is there any
> particular reason for that?

Vincent Untz was looking into getting the original copy of the thumbnail 
spec and converting it into docbook, last year [1]. (It was a little 
messy, because there was a draft docbook file, but the final spec was 
just html). I'm not sure what happened with that... Vincent?

Personally, I wanted the thumbnail spec to be updated to indicate that 
image metadata should be respected - especially orientation tags 
(mandatory), and ideally (but optionally) things like white balance tags.

Also, the spec should say that "failed" thumbnails should only be 
generated if the file was successfully opened (and not, say, if you 
didn't have read permissions) and no image could be extracted [2].

I proposed a patch for these two items [3], but it didn't attract much 
interest.

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2008-April/009400.html
[2] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2008-April/009397.html
[3] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2008-April/009431.html

- Mike