Look and feel of the GUI

[DenisPac]

After using GeoSetter for a long time heavily, I found its user interface very intuitive and user friendly.
Despite this software is not updated for a long time now, the existing bugs and limitations that will be probably not fixed, it is still the most usable tool I have for my daily geolocation activities.
Seeing GeoTagNinja as a possible replacement with source code available on Github and very reactive developer :-), I just miss a very same look and feel compared to GeoSetter.
This would include the following greatly appreciated features:

• Same customizable view with folders on the left, map on the upper right, GPX tracks on the lower right, thumbnail view with the main EXIF data in upper center and image preview in lower center
  
• Same contextual menu as GeoSetter in the image list
• Possibility to use satellite view for the map and switch between different views/layers
• Possibility to import favorites from GeoSetter
• When using Flat mode (recursive), I would prefer to not lock the screen until the scan is completed, but rather allow some editing in the already loaded images
• Possibility to use local naming for toponyms instead of only English naming

Ultimately, GeoTagNinja would include all existing features of GeoSetter, without its bugs and limitations :-).
I understand this will take time and I'm eager to help.
Happy to discuss priorities if this is an open topic.
Thank you Viktor for your huge work!

[nemethviktor]

Hi,

Yes, some of (well, most of) these don't exist because I don't know how to, in coding terms that is.

The TLDR is that the structure of the app won't/can't change partially because I don't know how to add movable elements or because the whole app is built around the fact that the central "thing" is a listView that has columns (explicitly) rather than thumbnails, so I'm afraid unless someone else with a lot more C# knowledge rewrites the app, these won't happen.

Also from what I gather the guy who wrote GS was using a paid library to do a variety of things, which subsequently hadn't been updated by its developer, or at least about a year ago when I looked I gathered it was grossly outdated.
That said i can look into:

• the context menu
• satellite view
• more of a question but i'm unfamiliar w/ the favourites in GS, pls elaborate
• toponym naming in local languages is in Settings actually :)
• screen lock is a feature not a bug. if users make edits to the underlying directoryElements (ie what the files are in GTN's own world) it can create an internal disconnect between ... things. :) :/

[nemethviktor]

Had a look at the GS favourites. It's just an XML/zip import by the looks of it. I'll see if I can get around to it tomorrow.

[nemethviktor]

Also, there's not yet a public dev-version but I've managed to sort out the satellite/streets layers. Prob tomorrow or so.
Also also, you do know there's an exif-tab on the right hand side, right? :) [ref your request on the same]

[DenisPac]

Hi Viktor,
Using thumbnails with location data below is so useful that I cannot get rid of this feature.
There should be a way to implement this feature.
I'm happy that you are looking into the other features you've listed!
Regarding the screenlock, I don't says this is a bug and I understand why you implemented that way, but I would love to not get blocked until full scan. This would save time, especially with folder containing a large number of images (and even more when using flat mode).
Happy to test when you have a new build.
Thanks

[DenisPac]

Regarding the following:

toponym naming in local languages is in Settings actually :)

I've this setting:

But still the toponym I get are in English.

[nemethviktor]

Hello,

Re "But still the toponym I get are in English", whoops that's a bug. My bad.
Ok, try the usual link https://drive.google.com/file/d/13uYyCQE31JlSUb2iamKdYh55bGNqQFOW/view?usp=drive_link for:

• satellite view
• fix for the bug above
• folder (launch) parameter (someone else asked for that.)
• this does not have your updated translations as those haven't been merged and it's a bit fiddly for me to keep it synced (and not accidentally overwrite) w/ the master branch.

As for the thumbnail view. I'm not promising that one, I'll look into it but it'd be quite a rewrite of the main features so...might be a while.

Unrelated but I'll be away mid April to late May so i'll be a bit quiet for almost 2 months then :)

[nemethviktor]

I've opened a new topic for the thumbs grid. (#164), can we please continue the discussion for that topic there.
Apparently to make thumbnail view isn't as complex as I thought because the columns are internally handled by the listview (more or less) but gawd it looks f... ugly :D
I don't have anything to show you just because it's incredibly slow at the moment and breaks when handling certain files. I'll need a bit of time and it will be an iterative process.
Unrelated but I've updated the dev link again because I realised there's some f...kery with the map not working when there were no coordinates assigned to a file. This was introduced by my changes to the layers so that should now be fixed.

[DenisPac]

Great Viktor. Thank you for taking my comments into consideration! :-)

[nemethviktor]

;) - happy to.
Can you please in the meantime check the layers (satellite) thing on the dev version?

As for thumbnails there's nothing to show because while my local build works it's dreadfully slow so I need to dig a bit. Jpg files are okay because Windows (technically the old framework this app is using) can generate thumbnails for those but raw format files need external tools and it's inefficient. I might need to bump to a newer .net version, which would probably help but would make the app a lot larger and drop support for windows 7 (unsure at this stage anyone uses that tbh.)

I'll keep looking but probably won't have much to show for a week or more, see how various attempts go.

[DenisPac]

While I'm using raw files (cr2/cr3/dng) most of the time, I still use jpg from time to time and will do some additional testing with them.
BTW, do you use the wonderful exiftool software in background (like GeoSetter does)? This might help.
Unless you see specific uses for supporting Windows 7 (out of support by Microsoft), it would be a pity to limit the features because of this support.

[nemethviktor]

Yes, I'm using exiftool but ET isn't particularly fast at extracting thumbnails because it's not designed to.

A vaguely technical rundown of the problem is that currently GTN uses .Net Framework, which means things like direct thumbnail extraction from exotic files is more or less of what windows 7 or 8 was capable of (ie, almost none). Those are native and fast (ref jpg stuff; if you were to fire up a windows 7 VM and load your files into Windows Explorer, you'd not get the thumbnails). Anything newer needs a third party tool like ET or Magick and they are slow AF.
If I patched to .Net 9 that'd bring it in line with W11 23Hx/24H2 but I need to read up on compatibility and not all of my dependencies are up to date with that either.
I can also look into multi threading but that may be above my capabilities. So some digging needed.

[StarGeekSpaceNerd]

I'm using exiftool but ET isn't particularly fast at extracting thumbnails because it's not designed to.

The old Geosetter program supposedly used its own routines for extracting metadata and creating thumbs for this reason. At least according to this old Exiftool forum post

[nemethviktor]

A large part of the problem is that listview (the grid thing in GTN) is, while technically capable of showing icons/thumbnails, it's really not designed to do so.
To add actual images those images must physically be in a file, rather than stored in the memory. While on modern SSD drives this isn't an issue as such but it still adds some extra time to extract and store the images. That's the lesser problem. The bigger one is that pics in exotic formats like NEF weren't natively supported till idk .NET 7 or 8 (about 2 years ago) and CR3 I'm not even sure is supported in .NET 9 (newest as of late last year). So for any of the non supported formats there needs to be some external tool that reads an often 80-100 Mbytes file and gets the thumbnail out of it. Since those are often small the actual image must be converted to jpg and resized etc.
So I don't know what magic GS used but native solutions are poorly performant.

[nemethviktor]

I think geosetter used some early version of DCRaw, I recall seeing the dll file in the installation folder
When I started to write GTN I had a look at that but discarded it because the preview creation wasn't a priority and the then-available DCR version had lacked file support for a lot of things.
I think there's a .net wrapper for LibRaw/DCR that's more up to date, I'll see if I can make use of it and speed vs Magick