Replace F-Spot with Solang?

[Laco Gubík]

Hi Marco,

See my comments below.

2010/5/15 Marco Laverdière <marco.laverdiere at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> Here are my views on the decision to replace F-Spot by Shotwell:
>
> 1. I've tried the latest Shotwell version (0.5.2) and clearly, it's
> still an immature application, that can't be compared to F-Spot
> feature-wise.  Right now, Shotwell doesn't even know how to import
> F-Spot tags (XMP), so it wouldn't provide some basic continuity to
> regular Ubuntu users.  Moreover, it seems that there is no way in
> Shotwell to opt for embedding tags within pictures (whether in XMP or
> IPTC),  which is clearly the right and modern way to manage pictures
> according to many experts.  For one thing, this is the best approach to
> provide freedom to user overtime, since it let him move his collection
> from one application/media/OS to another, without loosing it's tag work
> (even Microsoft has embraced the embedded metadata approach since
> Vista!).  Shotwell is also short on many other features that F-Spot
> already has.  To me, replacing F-Spot by Shotwell, as it is right now,
> would be a regression.
There is ticket raised for this in Shotwell track [1] and also devs
are looking on other photo managers, how are these managing tags [2].
It might be worth to let them know, if this is the biggest missing
feature when compared to F-Spot.
>
> 2.  I've also tried the latest version of Solang and my conclusions are
> the same:  right now, it's an immature/half-backed application, that
> can't compete with F-Spot.
>
> 3. I know that F-Spot is not perfect and that many users don't like it
> (while some others, like me, have learned to like it).  Having read many
> critics on F-Spot, it seems that it's main problem is that it forces
> users to import pictures, instead of just scanning the directory set by
> the user.  For the rest, F-Spot let the user browse it's pictures by
> tags, by date/years (timeline) and by folders (maybe this feature is not
> well known), so on the browsing front, it's not so different than
> Shotwell, wile it's more mature and complete for editing, etc.
>
> Now here's the question:  Do Shotwell (or Solang for that mater)
> developers will be able to catch up on F-Spot features (or to even just
> implement the neccessary features to assure compatibility/continuity for
> F-Spot/Ubuntu regular users between now and the release of 10.10
> Maverick (in 5 months!)?   Wouldn't it be more productive to try to
> improve F-Spot (which has a new maintainer
> <http://mail.gnome.org/archives/f-spot-list/2010-May/msg00012.html>), at
> least to implement some sort of directory scanning (i.e. the main
> directory set by the user), to circumvent the "mandatory import" problem?
If you look at list of previous Shotwell releases, you can see that
they are releasing new versions quite aggresivelly, and I believe that
issues raised by you might be fixed in time for Maverick. Yorba, non
profit software group which is behing Shotwell (and some other
projects), employs few developers (which seems to be quite experienced
people [3]) to work on it full time. Hence their ability to release so
often.
>
> That was my 2 cents!
>
> Thanks.
>
> (sorry for my previous HTML message)
>
> --
> Marco Laverdière
>
>
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[1] http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1623
[2] http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/1871
[3] http://yorba.org/about/