criticism and suggestions

[Hans-Peter Doerr <hp doerr web de>]

hi,

i'm watching f-spot development for some time now and while i think it's
getting along quite well, there are mainly three things which are
preventing me from actually using f-spot as my every-day photo
application. these are just my personal opinions, but i believe there
are other people having similar concerns.

1) slideshow.
f-spot currently has two (!) options in its preferences dialog. one of
them is for the obviously very important feature of using f-spot as a
screensaver, while it's not even possible to set a delay for the
slideshow modus. pausing slideshows or manually switching to the
previous/next image would be very nice also.

2) general image view and fullscreen mode
the image brwoser is quite fast in general, but unneccessary slow in
actually displaying pictures. this  is annoying especially in the
fullscreen mode. each picture is updated three times: first, a up-scaled
version of the thumbnail is shown, then the up-scaled thumbnail is
smoothed, just before beeing replaced by the scaled full-res picture.
why there might be reasons to to it this way in the thumbnail view, it
is just unneccessary in full screen mode. why not scaling pictures
off-screen and show them in one go as the slideshow mode already does?

3) sort by date
this is a suggestion for the "show in chronological order" against
"newest first" topic. i would suggest a "grouping" machanism which
allows to specify which pictures belong to one event (eg. "summer
hollidays"). pictures in the same group are sorted chronological (oldest
first) but the group with the newest image is shown on top.
each picture belongs to exactly one or zero group. this could be done by
selecting the wanted pictures and a "group pictures" item in the context
menu. a "remove selected pictures from group" should also be available.
these groups don't need to get names, one only needs to know that a
picture belongs to a group or don't.

if these groups also would be distinguishable visually (eg. by a
slightly different brackground color, as in gtk's list-views for
example) browsing lots of pictures would even become more intuitive.
well, thats actually what tags are for, but as one tag may contain
pictures from different "events" something like this maybe would be
worth thinking of.

greetings, hp