can't crop an image twice

This is the current expected behavior. There is a ticket for allowing the crop tool to work while zoomed: http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/3592.

Avi,

I'm not sure I understand, In what sense does the second crop operation undo the first? When I follow your steps to reproduce, then when I click 'crop' for the second time, Shotwell displays the crop rectangle I chose when I first cropped the image. In other words, after I press 'crop' the second time, the display looks *exactly* the same as it did right before I pressed OK when cropping the first time. Are you seeing different behavior?

As Vera pointed out, you can't crop while zoomed yet, though I'm not sure that's what you're complaining about - or is it?

I've taken a screencast of the behaviour, which might help.

This is in the viewer component - where you right click on an image in Nautilus or whatever and choose 'Open With' then 'Shotwell Viewer', not Shotwell proper (I've no idea if the interface is at all the same there).

Thanks for the screencast. The behavior in the screencast is expected and is how cropping is intended to work: when you press Crop the second time, Shotwell once again displays the entire image and displays the crop rectangle you chose the first time so that you can adjust it as you like. It's still not clear to me how you'd like it to behave differently - can you explain?

The behaviour I was expecting is exactly as if clicking 'OK' to the crop also triggered a file save. I expected that clicking the crop tool again would let me crop the now-cropped image yet further, rather than reattempt the last crop.

I suppose the easiest way to replicate this behaviour is to just hit ctrl+s just after OKing the crop, and then try another crop.

Thinking about it, giving another go at the first crop doesn't seem such a weird idea any more, but it's still completely not what I'd expect to happen on clicking the 'crop' tool.

Is there any point to be wanting to use the cropping twice rather than just zooming and cropping directly what you need?

Well, there's probably not a point as such, it's just the way I'm used to working.

I'd not be entirely opposed to not having that functionality, it just strikes me as utterly nonintuitive for clicking 'crop' a second time to undo the previous crop. I'd expect wording that better suggests this is expected behaviour.