User report from an amateur photographer

["Pedro Côrte-Real" <pedro pedrocr net>]

I'm an amateur photographer and an f-spot user. I use a Konica Minolta
5D camera and shoot in RAW+JPEG. I use three different kinds of
storage:

- 120GB laptop drive
- 300GB external drive
- 900GB RAID array in my server on the network

So far I've been using f-spot as just a dumb slideshow viewer. I don't
even use its tags. I publish on the web and ocasionaly record a CD.
Here's how I work:

1 - Shoot some award-winning photographs in RAW+JPEG
2 - Download them to my harddrive using a script I wrote that copies
every file on the card to two folders, one for JPEGs one for RAW
files.
3 - Import the JPEG directory into f-spot
4 - Slideshow through the last set of photos and pick those I want to publish
5 - For each of the chosen shots I copy its path in f-spot and pass it
to a script I wrote. This has a small interface that allows me to
select a set of tags (not f-spot tags, my own).
6 - Run the web gallery generation software I wrote that adds the
photos to my website.

You can see the result at http://pedrocr.net/fotos/

After this is done I backup the full contents of the photos directory
to both my external disk and my server. When my laptop harddrive
starts getting full I remove the oldest raw files.

No matter how old the files are I always keep around the raw files for
the images I've selected to be on the web. I have a set of scripts to
open and edit the raw and jpeg files that have been selected.

All of this is kludgy at best. Here's what a perfect f-spot experience
would be for me:

- Handle the RAW+JPEG case properly, making them versions of the same
photo and then allowing me to create new JPEG versions based on the
raw. Extra brownie points if the generated JPEG versions are kept
along with the raw processing parameters so I can use them as starting
points for new conversions or just tweak them. I think this has been
worked on somewhat.

- Allow me to set some tags on a specific version of an image. This is
for the web publishing part. Although I might have a RAW and 2 JPEG
versions of the same image I want to be able to set one of them as the
one that will be put on the web. I could kludge this by using the
version name but that's not ideal.

- Have a way to treat external or network storage as its transparent
backing store. My laptop hard-drive should be just a cache. I should
be able to say something like:
  - Use up to 50 GB in the hard drive
  - Use all the space you need on the external hard drive
  - Use all the space you need on the network drive
For both the external drive and network drive they should be synced as
soon as possible (drive connected/network availability). The local
harddrive would be just a cache of the most recently used photos.
However, I should be able to say that favorites are always kept in
disk and a thumbnail should be kept for all images.

- Have some simple API's to acess the database. I want to be able to
write ruby scripts that can query for all the images that have a
certain tag and for each of them fetch the filesystem/network path
where I can find them. Maybe this is already possible. Anyone care to
tell me how?

There are some things I don't actually want but may make sense for some people:

- Editing inside f-spot. I don't really need any editing tools. What I
want to be able to do is to use f-spot to launch gimp, do the editing,
close it and then have the results be a new version. May need some
coordination with the gimp to do this. Having some simple edits like
crop and rotate probably makes sense though. And for less advanced
users having levels, red-eye, etc, inside f-spot also makes sense.

- RAW Editing inside f-spot. This I don't think anyone should need.
There is a need for a good linux raw exporter but it should be a
standalone app. F-spot should be able to launch it, save its result as
a new version along with the settings used. Having a raw editor
builtin seems like unnecessary complication. UFraw can already be used
in this way. That's how GIMP does it. All that's needed is a way to
have UFraw also pass along the conversion settings and we're in
business.

I've seen a few discussions on the list about some sort of
album/photoshoot concept. I personally don't need this. Tags are
really all I need. If I want to mark photos as coming from a specific
event I'll just attach a tag for it while importing.

This is just my personal opinion and I'm not expecting anyone to slave
away at my requirements just because I wrote this. I've been thinking
about this for a while and just wanted to give feedback. I know at
least another photographer that is looking for a tool that works like
this.

F-Spot is great software. Unfortunately it currently doesn't do the
things I need so I end up not really using it. I'd try implementing
these myself but C# isn't really my cup of tea. I'd happily pay 10 or
20 euros for each of the features though... (not much I know) :)

Greetings,

Pedro.