Exceeding an Expectation.

On a previous post I mentioned the frustrations of interfaces which don’t  meet your expectations, so its a pleasure to write about an application which “out of the box” meets them.

F-Spot , credited to Novell inc , is a photo-manager ‘lite’ for the Ubuntu desktop user. It has allowed me able to collate my Photos and begin the task of managing and tagging and collating them. Nothing much of exception here, and thats the point , its software that is simply working as I expect it to and its getting the job done for me. The Tagging scheme enables me to sort and sift the images. I can edit ,rotate, crop and colour adjust the images storing the modified and or the original content within the gallery.

Importing the images from my SD Cards, CD Roms and network connected drives was easy and the import process provides the means of tagging the incoming images. The process gives you the option of Copying the Photo from its source to the F-spot Photos directory where it will create its own directory structure to store images into. One gripe which I will post a equiry about is that where images with similar names in differing directories dont appear to have been imported. Once imported the images are visible as a grid of images recovered in either a linear date format or folder naming scheme.
Like many other technically minded folk I run my own photo gallery software, to organise my images and photos. F-Spot integrated well with Gallery allowing me to highlight the one or many images and Export them direct to the Gallery and sub folders within that gallery.

Both the above packages are avilable through your Synaptic package manager and as expected the Versions levels of the packages is not likely to be the same as the release available directly from the source Websites.  So okay this package is no iPhoto or Picasa but then i gain more from the freedom that the software offers me in knownig what it is doing to my pictures.