Background and questions

["Warren Baird" <photogeekmtl gmail com>]

Hi all,

I'm starting to go through evaluating f-spot for my personal use, so
you are probably going to be hearing me piping up in here
regularly...   I thought I'd maybe give a quick introduction
so people have some idea where I'm coming from before I start spewing
out questions and comments.  Hope the intro isn't out of line...

I've been doing software development professionally for about 10 years
- Mostly C++/UNIX - but a bit of java and some windows development here
and there.   I've done a bit of GUI development (mostly qt),
but not recently -- most of my work has been lower-level and back-end
stuff.   I've also been a fairly active amateur photographer
for about 6 years -- I originally used gqview with a fairly complex
directory structure to store and view my photos - but about 2 years ago
I bought an iBook, and I was quite happy to switch to using iPhoto to
manage my photos (it was about the only piece of non-free software I
used on the iBook, aside from MacOSX itself).  I recently got a
snazzy new x86 laptop through work, and so I've been struggling to
figure out how to manage my photos on Linux without driving myself
insane.  

I've spent some time trying to use KimDaBa --- I like the database
focus of it, and the ease of adding tags to photos.  
However, I really can't stand the UI.   I really like the UI
of f-spot - but I find it's tagging ability (at least in v0.1.3 which
comes with ubuntu 5.10) is pretty weak --- it looks like it would take
a long time to properly tag a lot of photos.   

My feeling is that it'll be a lot easier to fix the tagging in f-spot,
than to fix the usability issues in KimDaBa.  I'm just moving out
of software development into product management - and I think I'm going
to miss developing software, so I'm kinda looking for a project to
spend some time on...  I have't done much with C# yet, but from
what I've seen it doesn't look that hard to pick up.

>From what I've seen of v0.1.3 - there are a couple of holes I'll need
filled before I can become really comfortable with using f-spot:

  - tagging - as I mentioned above, it looks kinda annoying to add
a lot of tags to a lot of photos.   I would envision that
each photo might have on average 5 or more tags added to it.  In
iPhoto I could basically just type them in for each or a selction of
photos --- not ideal, but it worked.  Kimdaba's tagging scheme is
quite cool - if any of you haven't seen it, I'd recommend you give it a
try.

  - multiple libraries - I've got a lot of photos, and I tend to
keep separate libraries for certain categories of things --- I want
these to be treated as completely separate databases of photos - there
are certain photos I don't want to accidentally pop up when I'm showing
people photos at work, for instance.     iPhoto doesn't
provide this directly, but there's a free utility that does it for
you.  

Is anyone already working on these things?   Has any of this
been implemented since v0.1.3?   I'm still trying to get the
most recent version of f-spot compiled --- I'll probably have more
feedback once I've got that going.

Thanks for the work done so far!   F-spot is a very nice
looking product and it holds together pretty well for such an early
release...

Warren