First impressions and bug 141180

[Dougie Nisbet <dougie highmoor co uk>]

I'm really hoping that f-spot is what I'm looking for. I've been looking 
around for ages for a simple, intuitive, hierarchical tagger for 
organizing my photos. I have photoshop elements and found the 
principles, if not the implementation, of the organizer suited me. Drag 
and drop tagging is something I find very useful. I've tried many other 
tagging programs but not really found they did what I want.

First impressions of f-spot are really promising.

I'd just like to comment on something that may be useful to others. I 
found during the initial import that I was getting errors of the nature 
"A null value was found where an object instance was required" and after 
a bit of investigation I realised that this had been reported by others. 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/f-spot/+bug/141180

I tried the fixes regarding sqlite but found it had no effect. On 
further investigation I realised it was only happening on certain 
images. On even further investigation, I (eventually) realised that the 
problem was called by certain fields in the image's exif data that were 
corrupt, or apparently corrupt. Specifically, it looks like at some 
point I've tried to add exif data using Windows XP and the field 
contents for "XP Comment" have become mangled.

Eventually by experimenting with exif (specifically ' exif --remove 
-t"XP Comment" <file>') I managed to repair the problem images, and as I 
type, the import seems to be going smoothly. Fingers Crossed.

I'm running  f-spot 0.4.0-0ubuntu3 under Ubuntu 7.10.

Cheers

Dougie