Why wont it do what I want it to do?

[Janne Ojaniemi <janne ojaniemi nbl fi>]

What am I doing wrong here? I don't think that my wants and needs are
unreasonable, as far as photomanagement is concerned. And still, F-Spot
constantly fights against me.

So I have a bunch of photos on my computer. They are NOT in my
home-folder, but rather in /multimedia/pics. This way they are
accessible to my wife as well. And in that directory, they are also
divided among different folders, named after the subject. This way I can
browse the pictures in filemanager as well, should the need arise.
Sounds simple enough? Yes it does. But why is this setup so difficult
for F-Spot to handle?

I want to import those pics to F-Spot. No problem. I select the
import-tool, select /multimedia/pics as the folder to import, select
"include subdirectories", unselect the "copy files to photos-folder",
and proceed with the import. And it does seem to work beautifully. After
the import, I have bunch of pictures in F-Spot. All is well, now is it?
Well, no. If I check the location of the picture in the filesystem
(F-Spot offers no easy tool for this. It seems that I have to select
"Copy Location", and paste the location to Terminal, in order to find
out where the actual file is located. F-Spot itself never tells me where
those pictures are in the filesystem). I notice that they are located
in /home/janne/photos/xxxx/yyyy/zzzz, where the x, y and z is the date
of the picture. And what I want is for those pictures to be
in /multimedia/pics/<subject>

I explicitly told F-Spot to NOT to copy the files to the Photos-folder.
Yet it ALWAYS copies the files to my home-directory, so I have same set
of pics copied in to multiple locations in the hard-drive. If I edit any
of the photos in F-spot, the edits are applied to the files on my
home-directory, and not to the pictures in /multimedia/pics.

I just re-tried the import, after I deleted the photos-folder from my
home. And again it copied the files to my home. I then deleted the
photos-folder again, and the thumbnails were still visible in F-Spot,
but full-size photos were not.

Why can't I do something as simple as this: Tell F-spot to import photos
from certain folder and NOT copy the files ANYWHERE. Just import the
photos, but leave the actual files where they are!

IIRC I ONCE managed to make F-spot really use the /multimedia/pics, but
even then, if I imported pics from my camera, F-Spot always imported
them to /home/photos. So my pictures were split among two locations,
when I really want to have all my pics in one location.

Why is this so hard? It feels like that F-Spot has certain way of
working, and it wont budge from that way. And I would have to adjust my
way of working to suit F-Spot. And we are not talking about anything
fundamental here, we are talking about the location where the pictures
are stored!