AW: f-spot-list Digest, Vol 119, Issue 1

[Gengis Kanhg Toledo Ramírez <gengiskanhg geo yahoo com>]

Hi every body,

I am/was a F-spot user since about 2008. I use(d) it to manage personal photos, we have around 40 thousand 
with more than 100 categories arranged in more than 4 tag levels.
I am a freesoftware enthusiastic with intermediate C/C++ programming level nevertheless I can not support 
free projects like this because time and work.

I wish to resume my feedback as user, I hope it can be useful.

At home I had to upgrade my linux to the newest Ubuntu, and the first problem has not only the fact that 
F-Spot is not the current official photo manager, but it is not easy to install it due to problems with 
libraries that I do not remember yet (boicot?)...

Nevertheless, I manage a bit to install F-spot, but I should install the default Shotwell because I do not 
have time to solve installation troubles... :-S

Shotwell includes an easy "import from f-spot" nevertheless the first issue I noted was that know the counter 
of my photos is about only half (about 20 thousand). I am not sure if the other half is/was actually repeated 
photos with different name and Shotwell has the ability to reduce them. I am not very worried because it is 
supposed that photos (and videos) are kept in my specially external HD that I used for digital photo album. 
Right now I have used Shotwell almost obligated by the circumstances since two weeks ago (only twice)...

As user I would like an stable photo manager in time (decades) and out of crashes.

For me, often F-spot crashes, specially when importing new photos... (usually I import 300 to 500 ones at 
once)
I prefer to continue using F-spot and avoid change, nevertheless I could not install that in last Ubuntu as I 
told you.

About stability across time, it will be very important to separate specific software from photos, videos and 
tags, this means to introduce and standard for album storage and management wil be very important.

Some features required by my opinion urgent to f-spot are:

- minimize software crashes, implement and efficient user feedback to solve them
- add the posibility to associate photos to geographical data. New digital photos have that data, but old 
ones or photos for other sources do not...
- ass video management. Nowadays cellphones and cameras merge photos and videos and importation and 
management should be together. When a common user want to see her/his album with a group of people usually it 
is good to see photos and videos together ordered chronological. Maybe with the ability to select one of both 
or both of them... Shotwell manage videos right now. In my case, with F-spot I create a "video" folder into 
my album folder with subfolders with the year name and number of month in the other sublevel. I manually 
order those videos I separately backup them. But forgotten is always in risk to do that.
- More that photo manipulation, I encountered manipulation of photo dates much more important. Because old 
photos, or new ones from a device that was not set up with correct time-date require to be fixed. If not they 
appear ordered with other photos, that do not have any relation... For specific photo edition we have GIMP 
and it is not sense to repeat such functions in my opinion. The same for video. Right now I have a tag called 
"bad dated" waiting the time and tool to fix those 2000 photos...
- I do not use social networks at all for my personal album, nevertheless sure many people do, so integration 
with such popular applications is a great plus...
- Cloud integration as well will be imporant as well as any new fashion...

Thanks very much to all of you for F-spot...

Regards