F-Spot: The Good, the bad, and the ugly.
F-Spot is included by default in Ubuntu as a photo management tool. I’ve done quite a bit of photography and felt like my images in their separate directories were starting to get out of hand. I figured that if Ubuntu includes it by default, it’s gotta be good, stable, and at least worth using. So let’s just get the point.
The Good: You can tag photos, manage revisions, view a nice timeline, export to various sites, without much trouble at all. You spend 30 minutes with the interface and you’ve got it down pretty well.
The Bad: What is this F-Spot View thing and why would I want to use it? Opening up an image with F-spot skips the importing (which I’ll get to later) bug doesn’t provide really any usable tools.
The Ugly: Speed is a major issue, especially when importing, and even moreso when importing raw imagery. I would love to talk about how well it handles raw, but honestly, it’s still slowly importing. Apparently it runs dcraw over the file (for some unknown reason) and that takes a while when you have thousands and thousands of raw files. It isn’t multithreaded either, so my fancy multicore machine doesn’t help with the speed at all.
Overall though, F-Spot is a much needed project. Hopefully these rough edges can be smoothed out. For people with smaller, or nonraw driven photo collection, I can see this being very useful for maintaining galleries. I’m still deciding what I think. I guess I’ll know once this import finishes. Oh, and if you know a way to speed it up, please let us all know in the comments.
Fastest way to speed it up is to use Digikam.
I gave F-Spot a try. I can’t remember all the details, but I remember not liking it. You should post a review of Picasa for Linux. I thought that one was pretty good.