Idea: several databases as albums

["Antti Ahonen" <aahonen gmail com>]

There have been some talk about possible album features in F-spot. I do not know anything about programming, so correct me if I am wrong, but could it be done this way:

Photos.db file is kind of an album itself, so if we would have for example 
photos1.db, photos2.db and so on we would have several albums. So minimum chances required in the program would be a startup menu, where you could choose your database, or start a new one, and in the program a possibility to export photos to another database.

So this way I could have a main database with all pictures,  and also  separate  databases for different subjects, like "Work", "Family" and so on. 

The reason I suggest using the photos.db
 file as an album, instead of making virtual albums inside one database is because I have had some serious performance problems myself with larger databases. I use older machines, and have relatively large archive, so from my experience I would say that it gets rather slow to work over 80000 pictures, and very slow round 130000. So with separate databases, I could always work with reasonably sized database and have all operations running nice and smooth. 

Before you reply that nobody has that many pictures, and everybody has newer machines, I must point out that if you take digital pictures, you propably will end up having a lot of those at some point, it might take years thought. And about the machines, many people who have older machines are starting to use linux, because new windows programs do not run in those anymore. 

And there are other advantages of this system as well, like if I need to show some specific pictures to somebody, like family-pictures to relatives, I could use all the F-spots search etc. features without having to go through all the other image material I have on my database.

Well let me know what you think, I thought it might be a good idea.