It has been quite a long time since last release, isn’t it? Eight months, during when a lot of things changed.

And couldn’t be anything else! It’s summer, but no F-Spot dev is on holiday! Expecially those engaged for it, as it’s the case of our RubenV, the only man for this year F-Spot’s GSoC.

As Stephane said, the NEWS file you will find in tarball doesn’t reflect the hard work done during the last months. Let’s have a look at the commit log:

• as I mentioned already, right after 0.5 the base dir was moved from .gnome2 to a more XDG-like .config. So your photos.db and custom addins are now in .config/f-spot
• the concept of Platform has been introduced in the code. Right now there’s only Gnome, but this will ease the port to other systems (Kde specific code, MacOSX, Windows?)
• speed up rating: now you can use ALT+[0-5], even in full screen view
• head to Gnome3: since long time the code introduced Gio and GtkBuilder dialogs, in order to drop deprecated libraries. Not all the work has been done yet, but the base is ready
• different C libraries were ported to managed code: zooming, libeog, and the most big change affected ImageView. The core of the viewing widget was completely rewritten by Stephane. And now is a lot faster than ever
• console verbosity has been lowered a lot, thanks to the usage of Log.* methods
• system proxy is now automatically detected for all exporters
• Gimp’s XCF support has been added, given that there’s a pixbuf loader for it
• renewed icons
• deeply updated Tabblo and Facebook exporters
• make auto-creating tag icons optional
• jump to random picture: type r anytime to go to a random photo of the current query
• faster type-to-tag: the much loved feature is now faster to use, as ‘,’ does what enter used to do
• allow printing more pictures and exif date near photos
• DnD code has been cleaned and split up, for better usablity
• new FolderView sidebar, to see where your photos are on fileystem
• added crop helpers in area selection
• new preference dialog: much simplier
• netbook love: all dialogs are now <600px
• adjustable filmstrip placement: improves photo view for widescreen monitors.

In summary, this can be a bare list of the most noticeable changes. Beside of these, there are hundreds and hundreds of small and big fixes, enhancements, cleanup which would take ages to describe.

And for all this we must thank Stephane, which still holds the lead of F-Spot development by writing the most exciting features as well as dealing with the most annoying cleanups and people (/me included ).
Along with him, RubenV is taking his GSoC work beyond the strict needs by cleaning up, helping contributors, reviewing patches. Other than that, RAW support is running fast! You can check on Gitorious.

As already said, since the move to git a lot of new contributors showed up. And the list increased day by day, you can check on Gitorious yourself. The main contributors which helped a lot for this release are certainly Anton Keks, Jan Klícha, Jim Ramsay, Markus Lindqvist, Mike Gemünde, and the others you will find in git log.

A lot of other wonderful people deserve mention. I’m talking about all the cool guys showing up in IRC for discussing, helping and welcoming new users. If you drop in #f-spot, you will certainly find a lot of help from piz and pmjdebruijn. Their blog also host a lot of cool info about photograpy and F-Spot itself.

So what are you waiting for? Join development of the most appreciated photo management for GNU/Linux!

• Zooomr export
• Facebook export enabled by default
• Tabblo export
• Compressed file export enabled by default
• fixed a problem with duplicate detection and gif files
• hidden cursor in full screen and slideshow
• rating in full screen infobox
• image resize
• better handling of keypress in full screen
• page setup in print dialog
• … a lot of less noticeable improvements, as well as updated translations

As I already wrote, F-Spot 0.5.0 includes duplicate detection: this means that you won’t accidentally import the same picture twice! During the process the algorithm creates an unique md5 hash for your image data only (that means: not including exif/xmp data), and compares it to the ones present in db. If an equal hash exists, and the duplicate detection was enabled, the already present picture will be ignored.

As you might have guessed this requires a database upgrade, and a time expensive job of calculating md5 for your existing images. This may result in F-Spot taking some high CPU and disk usage after upgrade, until hashing is finished. This job is scheduled in background, and shouldn’t harm the user experience too much. And don’t worry, you can close F-Spot at any time you wish, the job will resume next time from where it left!

F-Spot 0.5.0.1 should be included in all the main distributions getting out in the next months, that is Fedora 9, Mandriva 2009.0, OpenSUSE 11.1, and Ubuntu 8.10.

Enjoy!