[Gimp-developer] proposed solution for: protection from information loss

[Akkana Peck]

gib_mir_mehl at gmx.net writes:
> Additionally, the 'forced .xcf' behaviour can be quite nagging - consider 
> user experience for a quick Levels adjustment to a photo:
[ ... ]
> Where i agree with you, is that gimp should support the typical workflow
> which centers around a .xcf main document with several regularily updated offsprings.
> But that is another topic.

For that workflow, what would be even more useful is to be able to
have a command that could do both: save the current .xcf (.gz or .bz2)
AND, from the same menu item or keystroke, save a copy to a simpler
format. Then you wouldn't have to go back and forth between Save and
Save a Copy every time you make a change, and you wouldn't have to
confirm the copy's filename every time you saved it.

It would be great if it were possible to write a plug-in that would
do that, even if gimp didn't include it natively. It would need to
get the current filename (that's easy already, gimp-image-get-filename)
and also what the last "save a copy" filename was (not so easy --
I don't think there's an API to get that now, is there?)

> What if Save foo.jpg would actually flatten the image?
> If that was not intended, the user could easily undo and use Export the next time.
> Advantage: The result can be seen, with layers&alpha being lost. This is much more
> intuitive than textual explanations...

That trains users not to save intermediate results in some cases.
Consider the case where you need to add text to a jpeg with the
result being another jpeg for a website; yet you still might want
to try several different fonts, text strings etc.
I know, you're thinking "Why not save the intermediates as xcf?"
But if there are only a couple of layers and fifteen minutes of work,
it doesn't always seem worth the extra disk space to save an xcf
in addition to the final jpg.

	...Akkana