Newbie questions on F-spot

[mdowle mdowle plus com]

Hello,

I have just installed Ubuntu 9.10 on its own partition, migrating from
Windows XP Pro SP2 and keeping them side by side on dual-boot. When I
found out last week that Ubuntu could downsize the windows partition and
read it too, it was the tipping point and I migrated. It was very simple
and very impressive. It picked up my internet and outlook express settings
automatically from Windows. I was up and running in under 60 mins. Very
very impressed. My parents even used it (they are over 60).

I've found some sticking points importing photos into F-spot though. Have
very quickly browsed this maillist and I can't see these being raised
before (at least exactly like this) so here goes.  F-spot looks very nice
and fast though so I'd like to stick with it.

1. The documentation says : "By default, F-Spot copies your photos to the
~/Photos folder". That looks wrong. The default is actually ~/Pictures.
There is no ~/Photos. Looking closely, there is ~/Pictures/Photos where it
seems to _temporarily_ copy files from my camera to, and then it seems to
move them from ~/Pictures/Photos to ~/Pictures. Am I correct in this? I
only reached this conclusion since I was watching ~/Pictures/Photos
expecting the files to accumulate in there (because I read the
documentation), but they were only appearing temporarily in there one by
one as it was downloading from the camera. If so, shouldn't
~/Pictures/Photos be called ~/Pictures/.tmp or some hidden directory or
hidden file so that the user isn't made aware of this? I spent some time
reading the documentation and am still confused by this.

2. The F-spot 'way' seems to be to have all photos (could be 000's) in one
single directory and then use an internal database to organise them,
rather than directories for each date as I've been used to in Windows.
Could the documentation actually state that near the beginning please?  It
took me 30 mins to figure this out and I'm still not 100% sure I'm correct
as I see other people on this list seem to be organising by date folder,
and I can't see this stated clearly in the documentation.  I actually like
the F-spot way - its much easier and neater - but it took time to figure
out. What are the pros and cons? When the importer stuck everything in a
single directory I at first thought this was quite poor - I thought it had
messed up. There is no message box explaining what it has done - e.g. "117
photos copied from Camera to ~/Pictures, internal F-spot database updated
which organises your pictures by date and time taken". A message like that
would have been nice to see and avoided a negative first impression
forming.

3. The import window.  It has "select folder" button near top. Click that
once and you get a drop down of choices (in my case a long name something
like 'GKLSKK84GHK78' which means my Windows drive and a nice name for my
Canon camera) ... so far so good.  But I wanted to import from my external
hard drive.  How to select that external hard drive??  After 1 hour of
searching docs etc, by accident I discovered to click "select folder" once
_again_, and then you get a pop up box to browse your filesystem. The
problem is that "select folder" looks like a _title_ for the drop down
list of 2 choices in my case. If the "select folder" option was at the
bottom of the list, the line divider removed, and any camera in the list
are made the default (or your last used import source), it would be much
clearer that "select folder" is actually a 3rd choice. Or something like
that anyway.

4. Even when I "select folder" twice and see my filesystem, this window in
f-spot doesn't let me see my external hard drive (Buffalo Linkstation
250GB CIFS). Ubunutu file browser _can_ see the drive though (it views it
as a windows drive I think and says the filesystem is cifs) so I can see
my pictures on the external hard drive in a folder called "our pictures".
I didn't need to install samba yet. Why doesn't the F-spot file browser
show me my external hard drive whilst ununtu file browser does ?

5. So eventually I used the filebrowser outside f-spot so copy my files
from external hard drive, and I chose to put them in ~/Pictures/Photos
thinking f-spot might find them there. I tried one date first from 2005, a
directory called '0001' of about 30 pictures. I copied this to
~/Pictures/Photos/0001. F-spot imported them ok it seemed. I checked off
'copy files' option I think.  However it messed up the timestamps. So for
example some photos that was taken in May 2005 are being displayed as
taken in Oct 2009 by F-spot but others are ok. I'm not convinced my photos
are safely organised since the dates in Oct 2009 were other photos (I
think) which I can't see anymore. Not sure whether it has overwritten
photos or whether it had just jumbled up the timestamps. I'm converned
about erasing the photos on my camera until this is sorted out. Thinking
about it maybe I should have placed 0001 in /tmp, ticked the 'copy files'
and leave F-spot do its stuff, then removed /tmp/0001 afterwards.  How do
I now 'repair' or 'start-over' my F-spot database since it seems to be
corrupted.

6. Finally, I imported twice from the same camera to test the "check for
duplicates" tick box.  I think it worked as ~/Pictures didn't grow in
number of files, and my /home disk space didn't increase. However, when
the import finished it just told me "imported ok".  It would have been
much better to say "all 117 photos were downloaded before, please delete
from your camera when you are ready". Or "93 photos checked as already
downloaded (not creating duplicates for those), 16 new photos imported for
the first time. You can erase all photos from your camera when ready.". 
Robust messages like this would give me much greater confidence.

As this is my first email to any Ubuntu forum please let me know if these
points should be raised elsewhere or if I should include any futher
information, or if this is appropriate to raise as specific bug reports.

Regards, Matthew