Replace F-Spot with Solang?

[Danny Piccirillo]

If i remember correctly, F-Spot had to undergo some big changes to meet the
needs drawn up for Lucid, but i'm still not happy with it, and think it
would make more sense to adopt a photo manager that is already in line with
our needs. F-spots interface is so much nicer now, but i still get
complaints of it being slow and the fact that it requires you to import all
of your photos into one folder is...beyond words. I've converted many
newbies to Ubuntu and F-spot has consistently been a major sore-spot. I
always listen before giving my opinions on software with my new converts,
and i never have to say anything about F-spot. If they don't complain to me
on their own, i'll ask plainly what they think of it, and i remember the
last answer i got was a prompt and strangely passionate "ugh, i *hate* it".
All i do is direct them to the alternatives to see which they like most
(solang, gThumb, or Shotwell). Now i'm not saying F-spot isn't a decent
application. F-spot is solid, but we can do a lot better.

Solang is an unfinished product, but looks to be very promising (though i
hate to throw around that word). Solang seems to be doing things right, much
like PiTiVi and Telepathy, but hopefully without any lack of features. Check
this out from their FAQ (http://live.gnome.org/Solang/FAQ):

Why write yet another photo manager? F-Spot, GThumb, J-Brout, Shotwell, etc.
> rock.


> In our opinion none of them integrate well with the desktop. They need you
> to explicitly import photos from a directory and any meta-data that you add
> (mainly tags) get inserted into their private database. We do not do that
> anymore. We use Tracker (http://tracker-project.org/) for these purposes.
> It allows us to automatically detect all the photos on your computer and any
> meta-data that is added gets inserted into Tracker. So if you tag your
> photos in Solang, you can use those tags from any other application on the
> desktop (eg., Nautilus), and vice versa.


If Solang can mature in time, it might be worth making default in Maverick
or Maverick +1. The newest version (old one wasn't stable enough) isn't
packaged for debian yet, but hopefully that won't take too long. Bug report
for anyone interested:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=579606

-- 
.danny

☮♥Ⓐ - http://www.google.com/profiles/danny.piccirillo
Every (in)decision matters.
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