Where did photo editors go?
Hi all. Long time since last words from here, but F-Spot is still alive and rocking! They’re just (very) busy times!
So, since the announcement of the plan for releasing 1.0 developers’ free time shrinked and shrinked… As of today the biggest improvement made to F-Spot since latest release is the port to gio, which will allow porting our favorite photo manager application to different platforms other than Gnome (MacOSX? Windows?).
So, as I said, long time since last stable release, 0.5.0.3, but still there’s a question which comes up very often on IRC: where did the editors go? Why I cannot see F-Spot sidebar anymore?
Everything is still there, they’re just hidden! That’s not done on purpose, it was a trivial bug, but it’s still hitting releases. So, if you just opened F-Spot, and even if you have View > Components > Sidebar option checked but you don’t see anything, try dragging thumbnail view left edge to the right… Your tags and available editors will magically reappear!
As you can see, even if highly annoying the solution is pretty quick. I hope Ubuntu users will appreciate.
Since this blog is about F-Spot SVN, few words about these days trunk: gio-sharp was recently included into Gtk-Sharp, so it was removed from being bundled into F-Spot itself. As result, F-Spot SVN now depends on Gtk-Sharp SVN. OpenSUSE builds may come in the close future.
« F-Spot 0.5.0.3 bugfix release
Comments
Comment from Kragil
Time: 2 March 2009, 14:33
Since M$ started sueing Linux I will not use Mono apps anymore. Sorry. What is your take on that?
Comment from Janne
Time: 2 March 2009, 15:47
Great to hear it’s live and kicking! I’ve come to depend more and more on F-spot lately; it’s a good app.
There are a couple of real annoyances, though, and I’m a bit lost as to where and how to report them (not bugs, really, but…). The big one is that you can’t search tags by just writing them like you do when entering them. I have perhaps a thousand tags in a hierarchy, and there’s no way I can go around and find the tags in that tree list directly.
The second one is that you can’t create a new version of an image with a different file format. Say I have a “raw” file (a scan) that is a .tif file. When I want to edit it (with Gimp, say), I want the result to be a jpeg file, not a tif file. But right now there is no way to do that. I have to edit the tif files outside of f-spot and import the two versions separately afterwards (and keep them separate – see below).
Third, there’s no way to say that two arbitrary images really do belong together and that one should be made a version of the other. I get around that right now by creating a new version of one file, then copy the other file over to that version in a terminal, behind f-spot’s back so to speak.
Anyway, this sounds like I’m complaining. I’m not (well, not much…). I’m bothered by these things precisely because I find it a so very useful application otherwise. If I didn’t really liek f-spot, it wouldn’t bother me.
Comment from Matt Enright
Time: 5 March 2009, 10:21
Janne: Hit the ‘/’ key and start typing, F-Spot will bring up the find bar and auto-focus it, and it selects tags that match, via find-as-you-type
Comment from Maxxer
Time: 5 March 2009, 11:34
@Kragil: I like F-Spot, I like the persons involved in, I like collaborating. So, as long as the situation is this, I’ll keep on using and contributing to it.
@Janne: 1. already answered. 2. creating a new version with different type is a fair request, open a new enhancement bug for that. 3. actually the feature exists but it’s not compiled by default. With a compiler option enabled you will be able to drag a picture over another, thus “moving” the first pic as a version of the second.
Comment from Janne
Time: 5 March 2009, 14:25
@Matt: Thank you! I had no idea find-as-you-type tag search existed; it’s not in any menu anywhere. You’ve made my week!
@Maxxer, interesting – any reason it’s not compiled in by default? Danger of dragging images over accidentally, or some other reason?
Comment from Maxxer
Time: 5 March 2009, 14:42
Yes, mainly because there’s no proper UI for avoiding accidental reparenting
Comment from Janne
Time: 5 March 2009, 14:50
A confirmation dialog would work, I guess, but not be all that clean a solution.
If the UI made very clear that there were multiple versions and made it easy to grab the whole stack or just the top version, then you could just let the reparenting happen; if it was by mistake, it’s easy to just grab the top image and move it back out of the stack again.
Pingback from F-Blog » Moving to Git
Time: 10 June 2009, 08:17
[...] using it since time. F-Spot have been depending on bleeding edge components for long time (read gtk-sharp). This caused leakage of interest among a lot of contributors, which didn’t want to mess up [...]
Comment from corec
Time: 2 March 2009, 14:16
Thanks for the update, good to know that my favourite photo management application is still alive and kicking. It would be very sad to see this app to be left unmaintained. Unfortunately my knowledge of c# is quite elementary so helping on that field isn’t possible, at least not yet.
Anyway, thumbs up for all current and past f-spot developers!