Port to GTK4: Drop library?

[teamcons]

The stated reason for which the library feature for Music was dropped, was that people would for any non-basic usage always turn to more specialized apps with more features

so Photos is a massive honker of an app. It is genuinely pretty cool. But i kind of wonder if following the same logic as for Music would not be the way, for a port to Gtk4 ?

There really is a lot to work on, especially for volunteers (can imagine Danielle having a plate full already). Would the better approach not be to drop everything beyond the DirectWindow, and focus on displaying pictures, and the basics of crop/rotation/mirror/zoom ?

[teamcons]

Parapara is Vala and somewhat basic, i am considering forking and elementarifying it

But it doesn't have crop and i dont think id be able to do much for that, or any of the actual image processing

[danirabbit]

Not focusing on building a local library in Music was more because these days most people don’t buy and rip CDs—which was the case when the app was first designed. It’s much more common now to stream music from a streaming service. And for folks that do manage their own local music library, the feedback we got from them was that they usually do a lot of manual organization and/or keep their music on an external drive. There’s been some discussion about bringing back a library feature to Music, but we have to contend with the changing reality of how people consume music.

Photos on the other hand are still things that people take themselves and are personal and not something you get from a service. But it is more rare these days to be importing photos from a digital camera to your desktop computer. I think there’s still merit to having a library feature in Photos because we do have devices being sold right now that run elementary OS and have a camera with the StarLite.

But I do agree that we could re-evaluate and drop some features from Photos that could make it easier to maintain. We can probably leave more of the professional digital photography workflow to apps like Darktable and shoot for features that are more relevant for folks who are just sharing the pictures they take in a message or on social media.

in my opinion the biggest issues right now with porting Photos to GTK4 is that the original architecture is a huge lasagna mess, not really that it has too many complex features

[zeebok]

In regards to the mess that the app is, do we still want to have the Photo Viewer as part of the app? I think both paths have advantages and would need some planning to make each path compelling to users. An example would be if we keep the viewer as part of Photos, we probably want to plan something like having a button to Show in Photos if it is part of the library.