F-Blog » Import

F-Spot 0.5.0.3 bugfix release

Maxxer — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:19:55 +0000

After the amazing 0.5.0 release, introducing some very cool features, three bugfix releases followed. From NEWS file:

released a workaround for a bug on gdk-pixbuf, causing errors on png files
fixed a huge memory leak in export to folder (and somewhere else also)
removed automatic database upgrade for md5 hash calculation
fixed a very bad bug in duplicate detection which slipped in
added support for Sqlite 3.6.x (which is NOT backwards compatible for some stuff, see 1.4)

So, when you install 0.5.0.3 be aware that the long awaited duplicate detection works only for pictures imported from now on! The automatic MD5 calculation was removed because many user complained about having the hard disk spinning and taking CPU for ages without knowing why… People wishing to enable duplicate detection on their whole archive can enable and run the HashJob extension, which will perform MD5 hashing of all the pictures in database. The jobs can be stopped at any time, and restarted later on.

No big news in SVN, except the introduction of XDG-dir support: as of r4527 base directory moved from ~/.gnome2/f-spot/ to ~/.config/f-spot.

Duplicate detection landed in F-Spot!

Maxxer — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 07:06:48 +0000

Finally, after some testing and bug reporting, image duplicate detection made its way into F-Spot SVN on sep 6th!
Thomas did a great work in the latest months updating the patch and fixing the smaller bugs raised in the tests.
This is surely a long time awaited feature, and a great improvement for users, which now are allowed to chose whether to import or not images detected as duplicate of existing ones.
The check is performed on image data only, so modified exif/XMP or file names won’t fool F-Spot!

Please hurry up and test the new feature (and eventually report bugs), a new release is planned soon!

A step ahead in duplicate detection

Maxxer — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:25:38 +0000

Duplicate detection is one of the most requested features actually missing in F-Spot. The bug open for this request (#169646) is three years old, and a lot of people added their vote for this to get included.

Beside the fact that some should understand what an opensource voluntary project is and how it works, finally Thomas Van Machelen re spawned a quite old patch and updated/improved it to the current SVN version.

Now, people complaining for this missing feature should take some of their time and make some tests over this patch. Instructions on how to build the latest SVN and apply a patch can be found on F-Spot site. Always make a backup of your database before doing any test!

Tests could be:

import the same picture with same filename
import the same picture with different filename
normally import a set of pictures and see if there are any false positive/negative

Feedbacks of your tests are welcome on bugzilla!