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

[Larry Ewing <lewing novell com>]

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!
> 

The copy thing is a bug it was fixed a few weeks ago in cvs.  There had
been a couple of unsuccessful attempts to fix it before that.  Selecting
the import directories when using f-spot to do the import is on the list
of things that will probably go in but hasn't been done (completely)
yet.  There are patches that have been sent to this list in the last few
days that start to address the issue.

I'm sorry you have found using f-spot so frustrating, but I can't do
much more to help than try to resolve the problems.

--Larry