Re: How dead is f-spot

[f-spot-f unternet org]

Jack wrote:
> Gentoo just marked f-spot as dead with the comment "Dead for 4 years,
> relies on obsolete lcms, bundles a lot of libs.  Removal in a month."
>
> The only git items I see in the log for the last year and a half are
> translation issues.  Is there any hope of revival, or do I really need
> to start looking for a replacement?
>
> Jack

Start looking for a replacement. Even if f-spot development were to pick
up again (which seems unlikely but who knows, especially given
Microsoft's latest moves with regard to .Net), it is always a good thing
to be able to fall back on an alternative.

If you have (access to) a server you could give the openphoto project
(now commercialised under the 'Trovebox' moniker, but the free software
bits still work as intended) a try. It has no problems managing large
archives, you get instant web albums (which is not that strange, seeing
that openphoto/trovebox is a web service) and you can host the data in
many ways, using your own hardware or online services.

There is, however, one thing in which it is markedly inferior to f-spot,
and that is tagging. But, then again, I have yet to find a program which
does tagging as well (for my workflow) as f-spot does. It was what kept
me using f-spot (in combination with jalbum and a bunch of scripts which
tied the two together, based on tag names ('website-xxx:yyy' was fed to
Jalbum to create a site named 'xxx/yyy')).

What openphoto/trovebox needs is a fast desktop-based frontend (avoiding
the inefficient cycle-consuming web service layer) for these purposes.
That, as far a I know, is not a planned feature. The code is available
so it is possible to add it, given time and incentive.

//Frank


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