Newbie f-spot questions

[mdowle mdowle plus com]

Hello,

I have just installed Ubuntu 9.10 alongside Windows. Very very impressed
so far, in particular the way it downsized my windows partition and that
it can read the Windows C: drive, and picked up all my settings from
windows etc. This was the tipping point that made me switch over to
Ubuntu. I was up and running in under 60 mins.  My parents have even used
it (they are over 60).

A few sticking points with f-spot though. I like the features and it seems
fast so I'd like to overcome these problems.

The documentation states "By default, F-Spot copies your photos to the
~/Photos folder". Not so. The default is ~/Pictures. Not so bad until I
saw that ~/Pictures/Photos exists. I plugged in my camera anyway and
imported and I noticed that each picture was going into ~/Pictures/Photos
temporarily one by one, and then being moved up into ~/Pictures.  Thats
fine but could ~/Pictures/Photos be called ~/Pictures/.tmp or something
hidden from the user, and the Documentation corrected to say ~/Pictures
not ~/Photos ?  Its confusing for the first time user.

When the camera download finished,  it stuck all my pictures in one
directory ~/Pictures rather than by date directory as I've been used to.
My first impression was that it had messed up and it hadn't read the
picture time stamps from my camera correctly.  I hunted around (for an
hour) and this seems to be the f-spot 'way'. Could this be stated at the
beginning of the 'Import' page documentation then please?  I like this way
but a sentence like "F-Spot stores all your photos in one big single
directory and uses a database to organise them. We think this is better
than storing picutes by date folder." would be most welcome to see there
if that is indeed what F-spot does.  Yes the documentation states it used
a database and tells you how to read it using sqlite3, but its not clear
that it uses a database _instead_ of date directories. Even now I'm not
sure about this and maybe its an option somewhere.

I wanted to import pics from external hard (Buffalo Linkstation 250GB
CIFS). Ubuntu file browser can see it no problem - I didn't need to
install samba. But the Import screen in F-spot shows just 2 options under
the "select folder" menu title : my windows partition and my camera. 
After an hour of reading documentation and searching web, by accident I
discovered that "select folder" is not actually a menu title but actually
a 3rd choice. Click it _again_ and a folder browser appears. [It would be
better if 'select folder' was moved to the drop down list, the line break
removed to stop it looking like a title, and any camera made the default]

However that 'select folder' window still doesn't show my external drive!

In the end I used Ubuntu file browser to copy one folder containing 30
pics taken in 2005 called 0001 from my external hard drive to
~/Pictures/Photos/0001.  F-sport imported them and I unticked 'copy files'
option thinking it was ok to leave them there. But it has messed up the
timestamps i.e. some photos I took last month on my camera are now showing
in f-spot as images from 2005. I'm not confident that F-spot has oranised
my pics properly as it looks as if its overwritten my pictures taken
recently.  Should I have copied 0001 to /tmp instead and let f-spot do its
stuff ?  How do I delete or start-over my F-spot database as it seems to
be now currupted.

As this is my first email to any Ubuntu forum, please let me know if the
points above should be raised elsewhere or if these points are appropriate
to raise specific bug reports.

Regards, Matthew