On Monday 26 February 2007 07:06, Gregor Reich wrote:

Hi all

I've got a problem using gimp 2.2.11 on Ubuntu 6.06 (Gnome 2.14.3): when I try to open a file, (File > Open), I don't have access to my SMB shares (they are not listed in the box on the left hand side of the file opener as they are in OpenOffice for example). Is this a general gimp issue? Or do we make something wrong? What can I do (except for copying it all to my Desktop, modifying it and copy it back...)?

Hi Gregor -

I will just ell a bit of history first, then access your point.

The GIMP is bult with the intent of being a a good image editor. So the idea, given that developer resources are limited, among very ohter reasons, is that the part of the functionality that is not specifc to image manipulation, and, which code can be shared with other software to do so. This philosophy had ultimately led to the separation, in the past, of the GIMP itself, and the Gimp Tool Kit, a s library named gtk+ which provides comon resources such as buttons, checkboxes, scrollbars, and file selectors.

This has been a right decision, and today hundreds of applications run using the common base of GTK+, including all the Gnome Desktop project.

Overall, the mantaining of the GTK+ base is now done by poeple concerned not only with GIMP but wth all these software projects.

The File Selector from the GIMP is straight out from gtk+ - as nmost programs do need to open a file, that is quite clearly a resource that should be shared among several apps.

As part fo the gtk+, it is out of the GIMP developer hands -- although they, as everyone else, can suggest things to the gtk+ developers.

Samba shares, NFS shares, and a lot of other resources appear, by default, to modern Unixsish filesystems as URLs rather than file paths. So, if you want to browse sambashares in your file browser in a GNU/Linux machinne, you can try typing smb:/ in the location bar.

The GTK+ file selector has a, yet hidden, location bar - hit ctrl + l to reach it ansd be able to type in directory paths directly. For some reason, however, typing URL's in the file browser in gtk+ location bar does not work - it only accepts files and folders.

This is certainlya desired feature that has got a lot of discussion on gtk+ proper forums - the reason for ti not to work straight from tehre can be lack of man power to implement or some other I am not aware of.

However, the GIMP has a "Open location..." option which allows you to type the URL of your file in a straight way - for example: smb://yourserver/yourfolder/yourimage.jpg

This is good in some situations, but it does not allow you to browse your remote folder.

A viable option is to have a file browser open, that will display your remote images on the samba server, with a proper location tool bar, and then to simply drag the full url of your image ((pick it straight from that location tool bar), to the GIMP toolbox. That should open the image.

I am not certain if it can save back to a remote location with a single ctrl + S - it should do, and if not that yes, would be a GIMP bug the developers can address.

Finally, another option is to mount your SMB share as localfolder with smbmount, so remote files appear just as if they were local files to all programs.

So please, try these options, and give us some feed back on how are you doing,

regards,
js
->

Thanks a lot!

Gregor.

Hi,

GIMP 2.3 has support for accessing files on SBM shares over gnome-vfs. It's somewhat hackish as it uses temporary files in order to avoid having to rewrite all file plug-ins. But in general, it works just fine.

As soon as the long-awaited new file system abstraction layer makes its way into GLib and GTK+, we will most probably revamp the file plug-in API and port our file plug-ins to gvfs (or whatever it ends up being called).

Sven