critical missing feature: embedding tags in EXIF/IPTC

["e.m.fields" <fields emmett gmail com>]

Hi all,
As a Ubuntu user I love F-Spot for its quality integration with Gnome / Nautilus, and I'm very pleased with the refreshingly intuitive interface, (Go U.I. team!) ... and I'm ESPECIALLY happy to see the integration of a good versioning system, but there's one feature that has me switching away from f-spot towards the KDE application digiKam, despite its more complicated and not-well-integrated interface, (not to mention the annoyance of the 100 other bundled KDE apps on my GNOME desktop!).

But that missing feature is the embedding / importing / exporting of image tags within the image, in IPTC/EXIF format.  Right now, if I tag and organize all my photos within F-spot and then move those images someday to another system (or another hard drive), all those tags are lost except within the old F-Spot database.  This is tying the user into one system, and locking them into one software package, which is not very much the FOSS/Linux way of doing things, no?

I understand there were probably some intelligent reasons made for this decision not to use IPTC tags, but why should this not be an option?

If anyone can correct me on this and say that this feature is possible or "in the pipeline", I would be exuberantly happy to hear so.  Otherwise I shall (sadly) be continuing my migration to digiKam. 

I sincerely hope that this feature will be considered seriously by the development team.

peace, and thank you to the development team for this quality piece of open-source software

- e.m.fields
chapel hill, nc