I'm an amateur photographer and an f-spot user. I use a Konica Minolta 5D camera and shoot in RAW+JPEG. I use three different kinds of storage:
- 120GB laptop drive - 300GB external drive - 900GB RAID array in my server on the network So far I've been using f-spot as just a dumb slideshow viewer. I don't even use its tags. I publish on the web and ocasionaly record a CD. Here's how I work: 1 - Shoot some award-winning photographs in RAW+JPEG 2 - Download them to my harddrive using a script I wrote that copies every file on the card to two folders, one for JPEGs one for RAW files. 3 - Import the JPEG directory into f-spot 4 - Slideshow through the last set of photos and pick those I want to publish 5 - For each of the chosen shots I copy its path in f-spot and pass it to a script I wrote. This has a small interface that allows me to select a set of tags (not f-spot tags, my own). 6 - Run the web gallery generation software I wrote that adds the photos to my website. You can see the result at http://pedrocr.net/fotos/ After this is done I backup the full contents of the photos directory to both my external disk and my server. When my laptop harddrive starts getting full I remove the oldest raw files. No matter how old the files are I always keep around the raw files for the images I've selected to be on the web. I have a set of scripts to open and edit the raw and jpeg files that have been selected. All of this is kludgy at best. Here's what a perfect f-spot experience would be for me: - Handle the RAW+JPEG case properly, making them versions of the same photo and then allowing me to create new JPEG versions based on the raw. Extra brownie points if the generated JPEG versions are kept along with the raw processing parameters so I can use them as starting points for new conversions or just tweak them. I think this has been worked on somewhat. - Allow me to set some tags on a specific version of an image. This is for the web publishing part. Although I might have a RAW and 2 JPEG versions of the same image I want to be able to set one of them as the one that will be put on the web. I could kludge this by using the version name but that's not ideal. - Have a way to treat external or network storage as its transparent backing store. My laptop hard-drive should be just a cache. I should be able to say something like: - Use up to 50 GB in the hard drive - Use all the space you need on the external hard drive - Use all the space you need on the network drive For both the external drive and network drive they should be synced as soon as possible (drive connected/network availability). The local harddrive would be just a cache of the most recently used photos. However, I should be able to say that favorites are always kept in disk and a thumbnail should be kept for all images. - Have some simple API's to acess the database. I want to be able to write ruby scripts that can query for all the images that have a certain tag and for each of them fetch the filesystem/network path where I can find them. Maybe this is already possible. Anyone care to tell me how? There are some things I don't actually want but may make sense for some people: - Editing inside f-spot. I don't really need any editing tools. What I want to be able to do is to use f-spot to launch gimp, do the editing, close it and then have the results be a new version. May need some coordination with the gimp to do this. Having some simple edits like crop and rotate probably makes sense though. And for less advanced users having levels, red-eye, etc, inside f-spot also makes sense. - RAW Editing inside f-spot. This I don't think anyone should need. There is a need for a good linux raw exporter but it should be a standalone app. F-spot should be able to launch it, save its result as a new version along with the settings used. Having a raw editor builtin seems like unnecessary complication. UFraw can already be used in this way. That's how GIMP does it. All that's needed is a way to have UFraw also pass along the conversion settings and we're in business. I've seen a few discussions on the list about some sort of album/photoshoot concept. I personally don't need this. Tags are really all I need. If I want to mark photos as coming from a specific event I'll just attach a tag for it while importing. This is just my personal opinion and I'm not expecting anyone to slave away at my requirements just because I wrote this. I've been thinking about this for a while and just wanted to give feedback. I know at least another photographer that is looking for a tool that works like this. F-Spot is great software. Unfortunately it currently doesn't do the things I need so I end up not really using it. I'd try implementing these myself but C# isn't really my cup of tea. I'd happily pay 10 or 20 euros for each of the features though... (not much I know) :) Greetings, Pedro. _______________________________________________ F-spot-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/f-spot-list
