Re: Sorting photos, please

[Harvey Stein <hjstein covad net>]

I certainly agree with Jason on the usage of the file system.  I'm a new
user of f-spot.  I just imported ~3,000 photos so that I could easily
upload a few hundred to picasaweb without booting MS Windows & running
picasa there (the linux version doesn't upload).

I didn't want to spend all the time necessary to load up all the images.
And I certainly didn't want to copy all of my photos into F-spot - I
don't have the disk space for it & I don't need duplicate photos laying
around.

I got around the latter problem by importing links instead of copying
the files.  And I did it because I needed the upload function.  But, I'd
still like to view things as they are on my file system, potentially
move certain things around, etc.

It's certainly true that you can do everything you need from within
f-spot via tags.  However, that doesn't make it convenient.  What's
convenient is to treat the file location itself as another property of
the photo, and allow the user to manipulate that as well.  Similarly,
it'd be far more convenient if f-spot were able to automatically find
and register new photos/changes (as do picasa & kphotoalbum).  If it did
these things as well, it'd do pretty much everything I need in an image
browser.  Without them, I need to be able to work directly with the file
system and paradoxically, this makes being able to work with files by
location even more important.  And if picasa or kphotoalbum handled
uploading, I probably wouldn't have started using f-spot either.

Given that it can work with links to the files instead of the files
themselves, there's no reason it shouldn't be able to manipulate the
links.  Maybe if I get some free time I'll try to do it...

-- Harvey