"just displaying" photos (browsing directories) does not work

[Martin Pitt]

Binary package hint: f-spot

I have a large existing photo collection with my own prefered directory layout (flat hierarchy, event-based, not date-based, one folder per event), and also often want to watch/browse/quickly copy/select/edit other people's photos which come on CD-ROMs, USB sticks, etc.

F-Spot is currently lacking a method to open a directory to browse the photos in it. But even if I try to work around this and set the folder as default directory in the preferences, and then select View -> Arrange By -> Folder, I don't see any images. Apparently I have to copy them again (aka import), which wastes time, space, and requires me to clean them up afterwards again.

[Maia Everett (linneris)]

I don't think this is what F-Spot was designed for. There is gthumb for that Of course, upstream has the final say, so it may be worthwhile to forward the bug there.

[Sergio Zanchetta (primes2h)]

I confirm what Martin wrote.
I can only import, which wastes time and space (and a lot of duplicate images),

[DFreeze (dfreeze)]

Again a confirmation. This is the main issue preventing me from using F-Spot as a photomanager. I want to arrange my pictures to my own liking, and have F-Spot read them from there. Inside F-Spot the pictures can be arranged however F-Spot wants (ordered by date and time), but do NOT touch my folders.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

You can use 'f-spot -v', but the distinction is artificial and confusing.

[Duncan Lithgow (duncan-lithgow)]

+1 for this bug.
Possible fix: if a directory is opened with F-Spot why doesn't f-spot default to 'importing' the media without copying it to the default directory? That is the equivalent of browsing thumbnails of the images in that directory.

With this bug/rfe in Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu has no image browser in the default install (gThumb is no longer installed by default).

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Duncan Lithgow [2008-03-18 9:51 -0000]:
> With this bug/rfe in Ubuntu 8.04, Ubuntu has no image browser in the
> default install (gThumb is no longer installed by default).

Well, there's still eog.

[gobble (gobbledegeek)]

>>>>I don't think this is what F-Spot was designed for.
>>>Matvey Kozhev

 What is the problem Martin? People have grown up forced to think about layout in terms of folders. Why are you defending a serious lapse on the part of the developers to conceive how an application might be used? In your role You should be acting as the "marketing manager" who supplies requirements to the product development team.

So you are telling us that photos may not or should not be be browsed by folder?!! This bug was opened in March. What have you done since then to supply this requirement to the f-spot team?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Martin Pool, thanks for the "f-spot -v" hint, that works indeed.

Anyway, eog is the default image viewer, so the experience with watching photos from nautilus is ok. I close this bug report then, since f-spot is not really designed for being directory oriented, and people like me who do like to organize their photos that way can use gthumb/eog.