master and portable/detached libraries

["Jakub Steiner" <jimmac gmail com>]

Hi f-spot developers.
I'd like to pitch an idea I've had because of a need to cover the
following workflow.

Like everybody else on the list I have shot a lot of pictures over the
years. My 'cleaned up' library consist of around 40 thousand pictures.
When I travel to shoot pictures I usually take my camera equipment and
a small notebook computer. After a day shoot I import all my photos to
F-spot running on the notebook, throw away the clearly poor shots, tag
everything appropriately. When I go back home, I import them to my
massive library and delete the temporary library and resume my work on
the master library. There's a couple of disadvantages to this
workflow:

- I cannot do any editing. There isn't an easy way to transfer versions.
- Time consuming. Every time I do this, I have to repeat the process
of mounting my notebook drive or copy files over to my desktop machine
and manually import to my main library.
- When things break during the process (wifi issues, f-spot, ehm,
crash), it's not trivial to resume the import.
- I get a single import event in my master library (if you don't
manage to tag everything appropriately on the go, this can make things
harder).

It would be cool to be able to tell f-spot that this particular
installation is a temporary/mobile storage and tell it the location of
the master database file and photo storage location. It would then
have a tool to synchronize to the master library, tagging photos on
the notebook as synchronized after success and allowing me to wipe the
temporary library clean of photos that have been synchronized. It may
even be cool to hint the user there are unsynchronized photos when the
master library location is mounted/available, making the tool easier
to access in that situation. So in essence you get:

- a proper photo editing toolchain on the go (f-spot + gimp)
- a better indication there's no photos 'in the void'
- less room for errors
- better speed. While f-spot is reasonably fast managing a large
library, at 40k it does get a bit slower.

I would love to turn this into a proper functional spec, but I'd like
to check for potential interest /comments here first.

cheers

-- 
Jakub Steiner <jimmac gmail com>
http://jimmac.musichall.cz