Thursday, December 01, 2011

Easier Photo Management

I have previously blogged about the fact that we implemented a simple photo management tool on our thin clients so that users could easily get pictures into software without having to understand file management. This also eliminates the need to give users full access to USB sticks when all they want to do is take a few photos and insert them into OpenOffice Draw for a flyer. It's been working well.

A conversation with an end user has produced a new feature. I added the ability to select the size of the image that is placed into the clipboard. Their options are 320x240, 640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768. All they have to do is click on the thumbnail and it's immediately in the clipboard, and then paste into the various products and all the work is done. The issues of file size and megapixels is not easily explained to end users and this keeps it very simple.

In the shot below, pictures were taken at 5MP and then I selected 320x240 and then pasted it into Evolution and for an email message, it's the perfect size. This keeps the original high quality off the server when only this smaller photo is required.

(( This feature and function is unrelated to those users that have full access to USB sticks, this is just the default UI that all City employees have available. ))

One interesting issue is the Glade screen opening in a mismatched theme. This is because the software is running physically on the thin client and the theme is not loaded on the local flash drive. A project for another day. ;)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If your users don't understand file management, why not teach them? Teach a man to fish... and all that.

Anonymous said...

@anonymous: you obviously haven't worked with "normal" computer users much. those that aren't interested in computers.

they want to get their job done, not learn about computers.

Anonymous said...

Your server name linux-jobu is "linux-jerk" in Estonian :)
Just to make sure your first word in Estonian is a slightly inappropriate one.