[Shotwell] Two features I'm really missing ....

[pt]

On 29 September 2011 21:31, Dougie Nisbet <dougie at highmoor.co.uk> wrote:
>
> I'm all for innovation and progress and don't want to fall into the 'but
> software x does it this way' trap, but, er, this is something that f-spot
> does this really well. Single keypress, (t) for tags, then auto-completion
> on tab-press, or cycling through valid tags (just like bash shell). It also
> allows editing (like 'Modify Tag') in the same way as shotwell, by simply
> deleting a tag from the photo. Elegant and intuitive.

Dear Dougie, it seems that you and me are the only people with a
complex tag-tree, or at least we are the most `vocal' ones, at least
judging from this mailing list ;-)

I feel your pain, and I am eagerly awaiting for a decent solution for
the tagging issue.

F-spot was doing the tagging pretty good. And I would still be using it, but:

1. f-spot is SSSSSLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWW, while shotwell
seems very fast in comparison;

2. f-spot was writing invalid (or at least malformed) XML for the
xmp-subject tags. I asked for illumination in the f-spot mailing list
a few times, but I got no answer (i.e. no solution or simple
acknowledgement of what was happening); shotwell has no problems so
far;

3. f-spot *did* screw my saved-in-picture tags BIG TIME: I discovered
too late that if at some given moment you switch to `do not write
metadata into files' (in my case for performance reason, given the
huge amount of photos to be tagged), then do some mass-tagging, then
switch back to `write metadata into files', f-spot will just write the
*new* tags, silently *overwriting* the ones already in files metadata.
A show-stopper. I guess I should have used the (optional) plugin to
update metadata into files, but that extension was not available any
more for newer versions. I don't dare trying that one with shotwell,
given the preceding experience, so I don't know what it would do;

4. f-spot is no longer being actively developed, and the current
version is quite buggy, far from usable.

5. last but not least, f-spot is written in C# (or whatever they call
it) and uses the `mono' libraries, thus I guess one can not easily
borrow pieces of code from it and using it on other software (I'm not
developer, so this is just my guess).

Bottom line:

A. I use Geeqie for tagging single or small groups of pictures (pretty
fast and accurate, focused on XMP but AFAICT writes IPTC and EXIF
according to the MWG specifications). Also, the possibility to link
single keys (1 to 6) to specific tags makes the tagging operation
quite fast and efficient.

B. I use ExifTool to do more complex mass-tagging, like conditionally
removing or renaming a specific tag recursively into directories, or
adding several tags of copyright informations, locations and such.

C. I use Gimp to edit photos, and I manually keep track of the file
versioning (that was OK in f-spot, providing you had the `exiflow'
extension installed).

D. I (will) use Shotwell to *watch* my picture collection and to do
quick tag-searches/filtering, once the hierarchical tagging will be
stable enough (as you can see from my preceding threads I already went
through some of the problems you were experiencing, and I have decided
to wait a bit more to import my whole collection.)

In an ideal Unix-shaped world, we should have *one* application to do
the tagging, *one* to do photo-collection showing and filtering, *one*
to edit photos and so on, all *called* from one photo management
`mainframe', for so to speak.

My heart bleeds seeing that we are wasting precious volunteer
developers' time trying to reinvent the wheel with every new
application. Perfect example: DigiKam. It is an over-complicated
software that does *everything*, including making coffee, or at least
it tries to: multiple-tagging photos was painfully cumbersome. Plus
one needs cinema-sized displays just to show the regular user
interface (on a side note, DigiKam as well was randomly overwriting
f-spot-written tags, last time I tried it.)

I wish I could help more beside doing bug-spotting, but I'm not a
developer. Maybe in the future ;-)

Ciao ciao,
Piergi
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