Re: import hell

["Aurélien Naldi" <aurelien naldi gmail com>]

On 7/31/06, Bengt Thuree <bengt thuree com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 00:56 -0400, Joe Burgwinkel wrote:
> >
> > Please say it ain't so.  Does pressing 'cancel' on the import applet
> > window AFTER an import has *successfully completed* dump the whole
> > import?
>
> Ok, I will not say so :) ... but then I am lying. :(
> F-Spot dumps (as you stated) everything if you do not press the last
> IMPORT button (after all the photos apparently have been imported since
> the thumbnails are beeing displayed one by one)
>
> F-Spot's import process is perhaps not the best and intuatively one.
>
> 1) If you intend to use existing photos (that is, do not copy them to
> ~/Photos) then you HAVE TO unselect the copy tick box BEFORE you select
> the source directory.
>
> 2) After you have selected a directory for import, and watch the photos
> beeing displayed etc over some time you are presented with a choice of
> Import or Cancel. You must press Import here for the pictures to stay in
> F-Spot. Otherwise f-spot will erase all of them for you (only if copied)

Hi,

I am not sure this is the right place for it but since the thread is
opened, I would like to add a few comments. First note that I am an
(happy) f-spot user but I also find that its import system all but
optimal ;)
It has a number of opened bugs, a few of them should be closed thanks
to the "import tag from exif" patch. Some others are specific to
camera import (need an option to delete files from the source after
importing). On a more general side I think that the actual behaviour
is wrong: copying files before the import has been validated is weird
to me!
We should be able to open a directory, see available photos, select a
few of them and click "import". At this point and not before, selected
pictures (or all if none have been selected) should be
copied/imported. Doing this with f-spot now requires first to copy ALL
pictures (very slow) and then deleting most of them (faster but
still).

Additionally, a while ago, the cancel button did not delete imported
pictures and we got tons of duplicate when cancelling import
(especially as the import dialog remembered the last open directory
and started copying from it before I could do anything). Having to
close f-spot to import from two different directories without getting
hundreds of duplicates was fun :).
I am not sure whether this problems have been fixed or not (I remember
having seen bug report about those but I had no time to follow them,
and I am still working around, by fear), I guess I should check before
whining.

Is it any rationale behind the actual behaviour ?
Is it any bug open to discus changes to it (I found plenty of them but
none seemed blessed); I would love to see this shortcomings fixed and
f-spot rock from the first importing step, any pointer ?
I can open one if none exists, but I am leaving for 3 weeks, so it
might not be the right timeframe :/. I would be glad to start a more
constructive discussion on this when I am back (unless you guy rock
even harder by magically fixing everything by then ;) ).

Once again, sorry if this sounds flaming (my rough english may not
help here), I really love f-spot and this is the main gripe I have
against it.

Regards.
--
aurelien naldi