Comment 23 for bug 208467

I did a bit of digging, and wrote a systemtap script to work out what was happening ... and I think I know what's going on.

Nautilus is launching f-spot, this is configured in from System->Preferences->File Management, then the "Media" tab. There is a drop-down next to "Photos", which lets you choose what to do when photos are found.

On my system there are five options, ask, do nothing, open folder and "Open F-Spot Photo Manager" and "Open F-Spot Photo Manager". The trick is that you need to use the second option - it corresponds to /usr/share/applications/f-spot-import.desktop, which passes the --import option.

So problem number one is that /usr/share/applications/f-spot-import.desktop and /usr/share/applications/f-spot.desktop, both have the name "F-Spot Photo Manager" - so there's no way to determine which is which in the Nautilus configuration. That is an f-spot bug. It's fairly easy to fix just by changing the name to "F-Spot Import" or something.

The second bug is that f-spot --import with a file:// URI doesn't seem to work. I can see this from my stap script:
17432 exec f-spot /usr/lib/f-spot/f-spot.exe --import file:///media/disk

Which does open f-spot, and even opens the import window, but no directory is selected. I have to manually select my disk from the drop-down menu.

Using f-spot --import /media/disk works fine. That also seems to be a bug in f-spot.