f-spot good enough for 22k+ photos?

[Robert Latest <boblatest googlemail com>]

Hello,

just now I'm trying f-spot to organize my photo collection. My problem
is that I can't manage to import them all: When I point f-spot to the
base dir where I organized the photos (in subdirectories by year and
month), the program slowly grinds to a halt and stops responding
altogether after some 8000 pictures. This is during the pre-import
phase before I can actually click the "Import" button. "top" shows 85%
percent memory and 50% CPU usage at this point.

When I tried to import my photos in smaller chunks, one directory at a
time, I noticed that f-spot keeps both CPU and memory usage as high as
50% long after the import has finished and no other activity is going
on. Adding more import directories later creates the same problem as
before -- there just doesn't seem to be a way to get any significant
number of pictures registered by f-spot.

I know that the basic functionality is doable on this system though.
Some time ago I toyed with the idea of writing a picture db app myself
but didn't get beyond the basic import functions. But this program
already took only four minutes to scan the entire directory tree and
then import it into a sqlite3 db, with md5 hashing, duplicate checking
and lots of Exif information as well within 15 minutes.

I think f-spot wastes a lot of time with creating thumbnail images at
import. Also it seems to continuously piling up stuff in memory
instead of handing it off to the database backend.

Is there a GUI-less import function for f-spot? Maybe I'll hack
something together with what I've got from my previous efforts.

BTW, the rest of f-spot looks pretty good from what I've been able to
test. But it is very, very sluggish. This is a 512MB 2GHz AMD machine.

Greetings,
robert