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

["Ruben Vermeersch" <ruben savanne be>]

That's an incredible database you have there and it shows how diverse our users are. I've been thinking of adding a framework to collect anonymous user data (opt-in off-course), such that we can study our user base a bit better.

Anyone has thoughts on that?


-----Original Message-----
From: Antti Ahonen
Sent:  15/05/2010 22:24:40
To: Robert Latest
Cc: f-spot-list gnome org
Subject:  Re: f-spot good enough for 22k+ photos?

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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