Re-Introducing KQuickImageEditor: New Features and Design Philosophy

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Just read through and skimmed parts of this. This is great!

First question: Will I be able to replace qimgv with KQuickImageEditor?

For me, all the features added make it technically better than qimgv in several ways. Mostly in annotation, highlighting, and so on, obviously.

However, there are three main features I love about qimgv:

  • the mpv plugin, which allows the seamless playback of any video right inside the app
  • the media management features that allow copying/moving files to user-defined directories with the press of a number
  • extensibility and the ability to launch an app/script with a keyboard shortcut, like launching Krita directly from within qimgv just by pressing “K”, or “G” for gimp, “CTRL+J” for a script, and so on
  • bonus feature: the built-in file manager is a great feature as well, though I don’t usually use since Dolphin is so awesome

I wouldn’t expect most of these, if any, just asking to see what your plans are.

Second question: How will you be able to properly distinguish KQuickImageEditor from Gwenview and/or Spectacle (as you mentioned), in terms of feature duplication and having multiple apps that essentially do the same thing (not that this is a bad thing)?

I’m guessing you will answer this question fully in your next blog post, so no need to answer this one for a while. Thread set to Watching.

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No, because KQuickImageEditor is a library, not an app. Photos (aka Koko) could be used as an alternative to qimgv.

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Ah, I see. That makes sense. Will test Koko a bit then.

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Koko seems to handle large amounts of media files better than Gwenview. Off to a good start, as it’s able to do everything I sometimes open Gwenview for.

Not sure how to submit a feature request. How do I do that?

Edit

Done through a bug report based on KDE’s Gitlab instructions.

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I am confused. Gwenview, Okular and Spectacle can edit images. I always thought they do so using a shared component, as the functionality feels quite similar. Is each app reinventing the wheel?

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Gwenview uses a Qt Widget-only annotation library that Spectacle used to use. Okular uses Poppler, which is mainly for PDFs. Spectacle stopped using the library Gwenview uses because the main windows needed to switch to using Qt Quick. They are all re-inventing the wheel in a way, but they’re not exactly the same and it’s not easy to make one super library that every app can use. Gwenview could be made to use KQuickImageEditor since you could make a Qt Widget viewport for the AnnotationDocument component, like I said in the article.

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