Subject: bug#44172: bug#49347: image-save not working as expected for transformed image saving!

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2021 01:00:10 -0700

Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]> writes:

> It's not very useful in `image-mode' buffers, but it's nice for
> consistency, perhaps?  I think whenever you see an image in Emacs, you
> should be able to interact with it that way.

I'm all for consistency, but in this case I think it confuses more than
it helps.  Actually, to explain what I think, "rotate" is an even better
example than "save", so please bear with me:

- eww: I'm hard-pressed to think of a case when I have ever wanted to
  rotate an image on a website.

- image-dired-thumbnail-mode: the thumbnails are currently rotatable,
  but that just makes it go out of synch with the picture.

- In the icons.el library I'm working on, we will use SVG images as
  icons.  They should not rotate on "r".  The same goes for the logo on
  the about/splash screen, etc.

IOW, I think we should consider "what might the user want to do with an
image here?" and then provide the bindings to do that.  The consistency
I would go for is more along the line of "every time you rotate an
image, it is the 'r' key" rather than "you can always rotate an image,
anywhere, even if it makes no sense".

For `image-save' specifically, I think this command makes sense in eww
as you will obviously want to be able to save images from websites.
I also think it would make obvious sense in a new `image-edit-mode'.

But I don't see that it makes sense in `image-mode' that is
fundamentally about displaying an image in various ways, and where users
might be lead to think that any activated display options (scaling,
etc.) will be reflected in a saved file.