Few suggestions/questions and was Re: F-Spot on Two Computers?

["UluGeyik Deli Cypriot" <durduran hotmail com>]

Hi Patrick,

Your explanation/suggestion quoted below worked well for me.  Only little 
bother is about the thumbnails, I keep having to re-fresh them when I change 
computers. Probably something odd about my symlink at  
$HOME/.thumbnails/large which where I think f-spot is storing the thumbnails 
at.  It is already 220Mb's in size so I need to either ask it to generate 
thumbs on-the-fly (if possible) or make them smaller.

Now that I used it for something real, I think I like f-spot over digikam. 
Although digikam is more able.

Few things that I can't figure out whether are possible to achieve within 
the interface and if not, would like to post as feature requests:

1) ability to enter tags in a text field instead of choosing them one by one 
graphically which is very cumbersome and slow.

2) something like ".f-spotrc"  to configure more things clearly.So far , I 
only see Accounts.xml which is prettty much empty and the database file at  
$HOME/.gnome2/f-spot . I want to transfer the settings between computers 
nicely and use my favorite editor to edit them instead of remembering menus.

3) tags of the higher orders being inherited completely  when I use the 
lower order one, e.g. if I  use "People -> Family --> Cousins", I was hoping 
"People", "Family" and "Cousins" would appear as tags. Instead, "People" 
displays the subsets but for example, if I export to flickr, I get only 
"Cousins" listed there.

4) It would be nice to be able to control the default display. Right now, it 
seems to display all the photos until I select a subset. That is bothersome 
since my photo set is huge.

5) More transparent information about actual photo locations would be 
helpful.

Thanks again for help :)

Turgut

> > I see. I suppose it is not possible to merge two databases without 
> messing
> > up stuff (is this SQlite or something like that?).
>
> Yup, it's an SQLite database.  You can open and mangle it with sqlite or
> any other program that can read sqlite databases.  I've written a fairly
> nifty (but ugly) photo gallery application that uses my f-spot database
> directly.
>
> > What happens if I copied this file between two computers (like you 
> mentioned
> > for the external drive) but some photos are missing on one. Does F-Spot
> > complain and remove albums/tags  (I had tried doing that in Digikam 
> before,
> > and that is what it did) etc or does it function happily so that I can 
> add
> > more tags.
>
> Images that are not present just show as blanks if there is no
> thumbnail, if there is a thumbnail, they'll show their thumbnail in
> browse mode, but nothing in view mode.  You can still edit the
> descriptions and tags of photos in this case.  I've taken advantage of
> this feature quite a bit to work on my tags when I don't have my
> external drive with photos attached.
>
> > Ofcourse, I am assuming that I will take care to keep paths same on both
> > computers, I just can't keep copy of the whole photo archive in both.
>
> Yup, that sounds like a good plan.   Symlinks are your friend in this
> case.  You'll also want to ensure that the archive gets copied between
> the machines after editing.  In my case, I replaced the f-spot program
> wrapper on my computer with something that rsyncs the photos.db to the
> other machine when I'm done editing.  I suppose, in the most correct
> case it also should query the other machine to make sure that it's got
> the most up to date version, but I've not run into any problems like
> this yet.
>
> --Patrick

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