Re: Why wont it do what I want it to do?

[Thomas Van Machelen <thomas vanmachelen gmail com>]

Hi Janne,

On Sun, 2006-06-11 at 14:31 +0300, Janne Ojaniemi wrote:
> 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!

Thank you for so much friendliness.  Instead of just going into one long
rant, it would maybe have been a better idea to:

1. count to ten, think of the possibility that you might have bumped
into a bug
2. ask someone on irc, or on the mailing list to see if they could
reproduce the behaviour
3. file a bug in bugzilla.gnome.org so people could take care of it

I think that all this negative energy isn't going to get you anywhere.

Regards,
Thomas