shotwell

@Osse,

yes, this ticket is the right place for your suggestion. :) Now that Shotwell has star ratings, I agree it would be great if we had a screensaver that could be configured to display only photos with a certain rating or higher. I hope we can get to this within the next couple of releases.

For a screensaver functionality, I would prefer the actual setting of f-spot (you select one of your tags). It's more precise and flexible because you precisely define which photos are used, and you can easily change the selection. The purpose of star rating is different, though it may be suitable for others.

The “F-spot screensaver” is just a bash script launching the following command 'f-spot --slideshow' + some code in f-spot for the config dialog and the gconf keys. If shotwell had a similar command line option, it should be possible to do the same.

This is potentially tricky because Shotwell doesn't currently store a transformed version of each image on disk (though we'd like to at some point – see#1798). This means that the screensaver code will need to run the image pipeline. To do that it will need to access various items in the Shotwell database. We've never had two processes reading the Shotwell database at once before, and Shotwell wasn't really designed to allow that. So we'd need to think a bit about multi-process database access to make this work robustly.

There was a discussion earlier about shotwell running in a read-only mode. It may be a solution for that problem.

However as stated in the gnome-shell mailing list, the future of screensavers in gnome3 doesn't seem to be clear at the moment http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/msg00335.html, though it may still be useful for other/older desktops (gnome2, kde, unity, xfce …).