Re: f-spot good enough for 22k+ photos?

[Antti Ahonen <aahonen gmail com>]

I have been running a reasonably large f-spot database for a while myself, running on 192920 photos (app 2tb) at the moment. So I have been spending some time waiting for photos to import during the years. 

I also have been wondering why it uses so much CPU power to import files. 

Also one practical thing I have been wondering: when i import a bigger batch of photos, I first choose import but when all files are ready I have to press import again. So if I leave my computer to import stuff for the night, I will not get to use it in the morning, since I have to press the Import button and wait for quite some time before I actually can do anything. 

And since I will have to also merge the raw files, it takes me a really long time before I can actually start doing anything. 

If there were some commandline tools, I could make a script that would import photos and merge the raws, so if I leave the computer to do it for the night, everything would be ready in the morning. 

Still I am not entirely against the import with preview. If it would have more options: like full screen preview, more versatility in tagging, delete/remove from catalog option and so, I would get most of the things done at importing stage I need to do. 

-Antti

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 10:43 PM, Robert Latest <boblatest googlemail com> wrote:

On Sat, May 15, 2010 at 9:08 PM, Ruben Vermeersch <ruben savanne be> wrote:
> Import is quite problematic right now (and needs to be replaced). I've
> just reworked part of it, to make it somewhat better, but it's a known
> fact that it tends to swallow memory on import.

Hi Ruben,

thanks for the reply. Having done some work on exactly this kind of
stuff I know that it can be done much more efficiently. In fact I'd
really like to modify my GUI-less import tool so it can quickly scan
the entire directory tree and add new pictures.

Looking at the source, however, I saw that f-spot's MD5 sum generation
depends on the availability of thumbnails in gdk-pixbuf format, which
sadly locks the entire database<->file interface into an (in my eyes
unneccessary) dependency on the GUI.

In order to faciliate interfacing to non-GUI and/or non-GTK tools I
would propose to base the MD5 sum generation on the file contents
alone. I would also lose the thumbnail display on import, therefore
making the whole procedure a lot less ressource hungry. Like I stated
above, I can MD5 hash my entire photo dirtree (44GB/20k photos) in
just a few minutes and file the hashes as well as lots of EXIF
metatdate in a sqlite db in just a few minutes.

I'm too geeky and know too much about what's neccessary and what isn't
(or at least I think I do) in order to tolerate this.

Keep in mind that the first thing an f-spot newbie (like me) wants to
do is to import his entire photo collection into the new exciting
software. He doesn't want to see the machine grind to a halt while
looking at a screenful of well-known thumbnails!

But enough rants for now: Thanks for the great work, keep it up!

> That being said, we do have users with over 30k photos, so it is
> possible. Fixing the problems with memory is a high priority task. Hang
> on.

Scanning a directory tree and evaluating files one-by-one is extremely
easy on memory. I really would like to contribute a non-GUI import
tool (in pure C, I know nothing about C#), but that would require the
possibility of creating the MD5 sum without GTK dependency.

Regards,

robert
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