Tails

#2 Updated by abcfr 2014-11-24 09:57:25

IMHO, imagemagick is the reference cli tool in linux to edit pictures. Activists do have the need to edit multiple pictures i.e. before publishing them on the web, and there is currently no tool to do that shipped with TAILS :-/
As I’m not involved in the TAILS devloppement, I won’t argue any longuer this topic and respect your choice :)

#3 Updated by sajolida 2014-11-24 18:48:28

Note that all the dependencies of imagemagick (including libmagickcore5)
are already included in Tails as required by inkscape.

Here is the output of dpkg-query -Wf ‘${Installed-Size}\t${Package}\n’ |
grep magick after installing imagemagick:

367 imagemagick
320 imagemagick-common
555 libmagick++5
5899 libmagickcore5
1267 libmagickwand5

In other words we already have 95% of imagemagick in Tails.

intrigeri: just out of curiosity, which other many tools were your
referring to? I mostly knew and used imagemagick myself and thought it
was the reference for command-line image processing.

#4 Updated by intrigeri 2014-11-25 06:28:35

> intrigeri: just out of curiosity, which other many tools were your referring to?

I’ve been recommended to use phatch, that has both a CLI and a GUI. There’s also converseen (in Jessie).

#5 Updated by matsa 2014-11-26 20:29:14

I recommend nautilus-image-converter, which adds entries to resize and rotate pictures in nautilus’ right-clic menu.

Note that after installation, you have to restart nautilus, with the command line nautilus -q. For that reason, and because this is indeed a common usecase, I propose to include it in Tails by default. The size of nautilus-image-converter is 678 ko once installed.

#7 Updated by intrigeri 2014-11-30 08:39:22

> Now we need to research the cost and benefits of those different solutions and decide something to the light of this.

The discussion that happened on this ticket actually seems to confirm what I wrote initially in comment 1, so I’m still of the opinion that we should install none of those, and instead let each user install the one they want. Now, that’s not a veto, but IMO that’s low priority at best.

#11 Updated by sajolida 2015-02-11 14:58:31

It tried both.

• I already had all the dependencies for nautilus-image-converter, and it asked for 302 kB of additional disk space. It creates two new entries in the contextual menu of Nautilus: Resize Images… and Rotate Images…
• Installing nautilus-image-manipulator installed 5 extra packages (gir1.2-nautilus-3.0 libboost-python1.49.0 python-nautilus python-poster python-pyexiv2) and 2568 kB of additional disk space. It creates a new entry in the contextual menu of Nautilus: Resize Image which proposes amongst others, an window to resize. But you have to go through a first dialog which proposes to upload the image to an online service.

So I would go for nautilus-image-converter which is smaller and more appropriate even if the custom options of nautilus-image-manipulator look nicer and propose a setting for quality.

See screenshots in attachment.

#14 Updated by intrigeri 2015-02-11 15:27:55

Thanks for this report!

Here’s some additional info:

• popcon: -converter has 2.5 times more users than -manipulator in Debian. No big surprise, it’s been around for much longer, and was part of Squeeze while -manipulator was only introduced in Wheezy.
• upstream:
  • -manipulator’s last upstream release (1.3) was put out in April, 2013. The only change since then has been the conversion from bzr to Git, that happened late in 2014. It seems to be a one-man show.
  • -converter lives on gnome.org. Its last upstream release dates back to 2008. There has been exactly one commit since 2011.
• Debian:
  • -manipulator is maintained in Debian by its upstream author. Apparently the package quality and maintenance are decent.
  • -converter is maintained in Debian by an individual. Last upload (a Git snapshot) is from late 2011, which is not a surprise since there’s been little progress upstream since then. Still, it’s a little bit worrying that the only upstream bugfix since then hasn’t been uploaded to Debian, and that the packaging seems to be ancient and far from following today’s best practices (e.g. no relro hardening, too bad for a tool that’s meant to be used on untrusted data). Worse, none of the open Debian bug reports have been answered by the maintainer or forwarded upstream since 2011, some of them having a patch attached.

So, my conclusion is that -converter is even more worrying from a maintainability point-of-view than -manipulator, which is itself not exactly confidence-inspiring in this respect. So perhaps we should pick either one on other grounds (e.g. thanks to sajolida’s testing), but we should feel free to remove it later if it becomes a maintenance burden: IMO that’s not an important enough use case to e.g. become the de facto upstream or Debian maintainers of such tools.

#15 Updated by Anonymous 2017-06-28 15:02:35

The ticket description here does not apply anymore: imagemagick is in Tails 3.0. So there is a tool to quickly resize images, on the command line at least.

#16 Updated by Anonymous 2017-06-28 15:03:49

Now, there is no out of the box GUI tool to do this, except for blown up Gimp.

Tasks to move this ticket forward: choose a tool. The debian package of nautilus-image-manioulator has seen no update in >3 years. nautilus-image-converter has though. It seems to be maintained by the Debian QA group: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nautilus-image-converter nowadays. This inverts what intrigeri has researched before.

We should try to decide at the next monthly meeting if we really want to include this tool IMO.