Re: To get me to switch, F-Spot needs...

[Warren Baird <photogeekmtl gmail com>]

Seb Payne wrote:
Hi Seb,

I was kinda in the same boat as you - although I was an iPhoto user. 
Then my work bought me a fairly kick-ass linux laptop, and I couldn't 
justify using the mac any more.

> A it fails miserably. I have 
> thousands and thousands of tags and having a large photo with each tag 
> means it wastes space and if I have 1000s of tags, it is impossible to 
> find any.

There's a patch available that lets you control the size of the tag icon 
- this makes it a lot more useable.   There's also a 'hidden' feature 
for adding tags to images - press 't', and then just type the tag names 
comma-separated, with auto-complete.   It still isn't perfect, but it's 
a lot better.

> E needs improvement and more control over the 
> slideshow - times? music?

There are a couple of patches floating around that give you more control 
over the slideshow mode - including adding control over the timing and 
adding keyboard controls to pause, resume and move around.   I haven't 
seen anyone working on music, though...

> F is a lot better to than other Linux 
> solutions but the ability to search by date, event would be big.

This is probably the area in f-spot that still bugs me the most.  I 
really miss iphoto's 'virtual' folders, where you can specify a very 
complex search query, and the folder always shows you all photos that 
match the query.

I'm hoping that the F_SPOT_QUERY branch will be merged into HEAD 
sometime soon so I can take a closer look at it...

> So, the features of F-Spot are mainly there. Currently, the interface is 
> just unworkable and will keep me on OS X. I'mwilling to do a mockupof 
> what I think would be good if anyone wants one

I'd certainly be interesting in seeing a mockup like that...

Warren