New feature idea: ability to show original image #16
Description
Sometimes it would be nice to easily show the original image. Maybe the coloring made some text hard to read or you are just curious to see how it looked before coloring.
This could be done in a number of ways. The first few I can think of are:
- Replace the colored version with the original on the page so you only see the original.
- Try to show both original and colored version side-by-side or vertically.
- Be able to swap back and forth quickly.
- Load the whole page in another window or tab without coloring.
I want to be sure the regular reading experience is not cluttered with any new visible buttons in the page. Even if they only show up on hover, they will often be flickering into view. I was thinking of a right-click menu item to make this happen, but maybe nobody would ever find it and in some browsers that menu is already crowded. Maybe something in the settings popup could enable showing originals.
It will take a little thought about how to implement since we currently discard the original image data and src when it gets colored.
There is also a lot of variety in how pages handle images. Some natively keep only a few img elements and create and destroy them as you read, others have one for every image in the chapter but clear the image data of ones that have scrolled by to save memory. Saving all original image data will increase by double (or more) the memory a page takes up while reading, so we may not want to enable it by default.
A related feature would be allowing the user to force coloring of an image that was not originally colored because there is already some color in it. This may end up needing its own separate issue for discussion and implementation, but it may help to think about both as we figure out what to do.