Some ideas of improvements for file chooser
I’m not saying that file chooser is bad at all for selecting files, but there are two features I would definitely love in it:
- Being able to get the size of the file.
- Thumbnailing support
Size of the file #
The use case I found where I need this is “adding attachments in evolution”. If I want to send a mail, I usually want to avoid sending very big files as this is not very good for most mail accounts people use.
If I want to do this with Evolution/Gnome, I have to open the folder with Nautilus to check the size of the files.
In fact, you can find other interesting information you’ll want to check when you are opening a file with file chooser. For example, the id3 tags of a mp3/ogg file.
I suppose the UI design experts can point good ideas about this. For me it would be enough if the contextual menu of a file would offer a “Properties” action.
Thumbnailing #
We don’t need thumbnailing only for opening a file from gimp or to attach an image. The thumbnail of a image works better than the file name to describe the contents of a file, so we should enable the user to use it to know which file he’s managing, even when the application is not a imaging related one. So I suppose it should enable thumbnails by default.
And a last very easy to implement idea #
Just provide a way to open in nautilus a folder you’re viewing in file chooser. Not sure how, as a “open folder” button would lead to confussion. Maybe “browse here”? This way you could easily access to all the operations available in nautilus for files and folder, without having to browse to a folder two times (one in file chooser and one in nautilus).