There have been some talk about possible album features in F-spot. I
do not know anything about programming, so correct me if I am wrong,
but could it be done this way:
Photos.db file is kind of an album itself, so if we would have for
example photos1.db, photos2.db and so on we would have several albums.
So minimum chances required in the program would be a startup menu,
where you could choose your database, or start a new one, and in the
program a possibility to export photos to another database.
So this way I could have a main database with all pictures, and also
separate databases for different subjects, like "Work", "Family" and
so on.
The reason I suggest using the photos.db file as an album, instead of
making virtual albums inside one database is because I have had some
serious performance problems myself with larger databases. I use older
machines, and have relatively large archive, so from my experience I
would say that it gets rather slow to work over 80000 pictures, and
very slow round 130000. So with separate databases, I could always
work with reasonably sized database and have all operations running
nice and smooth.
Before you reply that nobody has that many pictures, and everybody has
newer machines, I must point out that if you take digital pictures,
you propably will end up having a lot of those at some point, it might
take years thought. And about the machines, many people who have older
machines are starting to use linux, because new windows programs do
not run in those anymore.
And there are other advantages of this system as well, like if I need
to show some specific pictures to somebody, like family-pictures to
relatives, I could use all the F-spots search etc. features without
having to go through all the other image material I have on my database.
Well let me know what you think, I thought it might be a good idea.