Re: Photo grouping

["Marcus Hast" <marcushast gmail com>]

Hi all,
I've been lurking in the mailing list for a while but haven't really
said anything. I noticed F-Spot a while ago and booted up a Mono CD to
see it in action, and I have to say I was impressed. I still haven't
taken the jump to Linux on the desktop but F-Spot may well be the
program that draws me over.

While I haven't coded in C# before I'm used to Java and they are quite
similar from what I've understood. So when I do make the jump I'll
likely be able to help out.

> The basic feature I'd like to have a kind of "hidden grouping".
> Although only the final combined result would be shown in the
<Snip>

Having more advanced ways of grouping images seems like a nice idea.
Since I've been playing with panoramas/HDR a bit I've found it
annoying that Picasa (which I use on Win32) don't have a stacking
concept. Basically the HDR/panorama source images are pretty
uninteresting on their own, so I want to move them aside and instead
only see the combined result.

> The way I'd currently do this is to add the concept of something like
> a "workspace" ...  with one or more output
> images, these being what is shown in the main browser. ... This simple
> workspace would allow all the basic retouching operations that F-Spot
> does right now.

> I'm going to think about this a while more, and blog a better
> thought-out version with diagrams and incorporating any input I get.
> I'd really appreciate ideas and feedback.

Before I found F-Spot one of the applications I'd wanted to do was a
Photography "work-flow" app. It's pretty much what you talk about
above, but a central idea was to have a lot of possible chaining of
operations. Basically make a simple "black box" of a photo operation
(like tuning channels) and let it accept one image and spit out
another. The box would then have a bunch of "dials" which would tune
how it worked.

The idea would be that you could take one (or several) images and run
a "work flow" on them and you got a result out. If you wanted to tune
it you could open the work flow up and tune the parameters so it
suited that image. (Possibly saving the settings to make it easier to
apply to a new image set.)

I'm not sure if this would suit in the F-Spot idea of photo
management. I'm personally thinking it might be even better to have
multiple applications which cooperate instead of one big program which
does a little of everything.

If you are interested I can go over my notes (most are on paper) and
see if I can come up with a more coherent design.

It would also be nice to see some responses from the dev team on
F-Spot with comments on where you see the program heading in the near
(and far) future.

Regads,
Marcus Hast