f-spot not very robust handling messed-up exifs

[Dougie Nisbet <dougie highmoor co uk>]

I have a Nikon Coolpix S600 that sees occasional use. I've noticed 
before that any images taken with it cause problems for f-spot. These 
seem to be related to the exif header - I think it may be corrupt in 
some way. Any changes to metadata cannot be written to the jpeg and are 
always written to an xmp sidecar file. I noticed today that if I viewed 
the the files initially in gthumb and rotated the photos that needed 
rotated it caused f-spot to crash during a later import. Interestingly 
the images that caused the crash (the rotated ones) were saved to 
/jpegs/1/01/01 whereas the ok jpegs were saved to /jpegs/2010/11/21. I 
checked the datestamps on the rotated images and they were correct for 
today.

I haven't logged a bug for this (although I'd be happy to do so - I have 
the debug output, no idea what category to log it under though) as it 
seems to be just this camera that produces problems. I find it easier 
just to nuke the header (using "jhead -purejpg *" pre-import) rather 
than mess around trying to find out which particular idiosyncrasy is 
causing the problems. It's important to me to store my tags in the jpeg 
itself.

Dougie