F-spot first impressions

["Morten Siebuhr" <msiebuhr gmail com>]

I'm currently beginning to use F-spot as my only photo-management
application (formerly used Google Picasa under Windows XP). Being a
developer myself, I like getting first-impression feedback from users,
so here's my F-spot first impressions. Most of it is actually bugs,
but I've included my whole list none the less. I've also added some
random ideas for random improvements. I've been using the version in
Ubutnu Dapper on a 1 GHz laptop.


Import dialog:

- When I create a new tag under "Attach tag:", it doesn't get attached.
- With a long list of tags, it gets quite scroll-intensive to get to
the "New tag"-option - why not have an extra "Attach new tag: <text
box>" below the "Attach tag:"? (With semantics like the semi-secret
"t"-shortcut.)
- I have a NTFS/Windows-partition mounted, which makes it show up in
the import dialog - it kills f-spot if I select that by accident -
could there be a safe-guard against trying to import mounts which does
not seem to be flash-cards?


Browsing:

- When adding comments, the text box stays in focus, seemingly no
matter what key pressed. <shift>-<tab> does it, but why not simply
<enter> and/or <esc>?
- When looking at individual pictures, <space> goes *backwards* in
time and <backspace> goes forward. That seems very awkward for me, and
backwards of every other photo program I remember using.
- When looking at pictures in full screen, the <left> and <right>-keys
does not work until either <space> or <backspace> has been used.
- When in the overview-mode, why is the bottom-most pane consists of a
"add photos"-button, a "F-spot"-label (identical to window title, by
the way) and a zoom-control. I understand the zoom-control, and the
add-button, but why not use the remaining space to show some useful
information ("Currently browsing 973 photos of total 10534 in
collection")?
- The tags-browser is great, but it could be better. - A lot of space
is wasted on showing a big thumbnail/icon and a little bit of text.
Why not do like Rhythmbox' "Queued songs", showing a the title (which
would be the tag name) in large font, and showing album and band name
(eg. number of photos with the tag) with a smaller font. Personally, I
think it would be really nice if the timestamp of the earliest and
latest photo with the tag could be shown in a sensible way.
- All photo dates is seemingly shown in GMT, not local time.


Photo manipulation:

- Where is the undo-button? Currently it seems the photo has to be
removed from the collection, delete the extra files created and
re-import the picture...
- I really fancy Picasas cropping and rotating - when selecting a area
with the crop-tool, the to-be cropped part is grayed out, giving a
stronger visual clue about what the result is going to look like. And
Picasa has s crop-preview... The rotation-tool is able to do
increments less than 90-degrees, which makes it usable. (Perhaps a
"straighten"-option where you add two points along a vertical or
horizontal line in the photo, and then rotate it accordingly?)
- When color-correcting, it takes an instant too long to make the
changes show, which makes it somewhat irritating to use. And why can't
the values be re-adjusted later?


Export to folder:

- When "rescale pictures" is selected, the exported pictures are
rotated correctly. If it's not, the pictures are not rotated. Took
some time to figure out ;-)
- When "rescale pictures" are selected, small pictures get up-scaled,
which (at least to me) seems counter-intuitive. I use it to enforce a
maximum size of my pictures, not the other way around :-)
- When exporting to a folder, the progress-bar immediately hit 100%
and stay there until the export is finished.
- The exported pictures are way smaller than the originals, measured
in file size (~2.1 MB -> ~1.3 MB). As I doubt Canons DSLRs are *that*
bad at JPEG-compression, what data is discarded? (And where do I set
the JPEG compression factor?)
- The export-sub menu has a "Export to Web Gallery"-option (which I
*guess* refers to Gallary2), but there's also an almost identically
labelled option in the "Export to Folder"-dialog. Potentially very
confusing.


That said (well, written), I really do like and enjoy F-spot as-is.
Keep up the good work, everybody!

--
Morten Siebuhr