Four weeks after F-Spot 0.7.0, we are happy to announce the immediate availability of the second release in the 0.7 development series: F-Spot 0.7.1. This series will lead up to the release of F-Spot 0.8.0, which is scheduled for the beginning of September, well in time for inclusion in the major distributions. Here’s an overview of some of the major changes in this release:
Better metadata through Taglib#
One of the larger sources of instability in F-Spot was the sometimes fragile handling of metadata. After careful consideration, Mike Gemünde and I chose to extend the Taglib# library used by e.g. Banshee and add image support to it (code on gitorious). We have been working on this for almost a year and it is now in a usable state. This brings us much better metadata handling in F-Spot, backed with an extensive regression suite so that we’re actually sure to be handling your data safely. It also brings us fun features like full support for XMP sidecars, a must for those worried about file integrity.
This work isn’t done yet, there might be issues with files we haven’t encountered yet and not all RAW formats we used to support are understood right now. We will make sure all of this is fixed before 0.8.0. If you run into trouble, please file a bug.
Remove from camera
The importer now gives you the option to remove files from the camera after a successful import. We’ve long refused to add this because it is generally not a good idea to do so: you should really backup first. However, you are also free to do what you want. Now you can.
The little warning button pops up a warning that explains how you should really backup first before doing this.
Piles of cleanups, back to lean and mean
We’re working with a long-term vision here: part of the goals of the 0.7 series is becoming lean and mean again, cleaning up the codebase and making F-Spot maintainable/hackable again. This means that a lot of work happens behind the scenes. Probably the best way to illustrate this is this pretty graph from Ohloh:
The interesting part is on the far right: steadily dropping.
On the far right you can see how we’ve been steadily reducing the amount of code from well over 200K lines to somewhere in the mid 100K. All of this while improving and adding stuff. We’re truly building the foundation for the future here.
Bugs!
And finally, there’s over 85 bugs closed. Similar evolution as the LOC number here: fixing faster than it is growing.
Goodie, I want!
You can get all of this goodness through GNOME FTP, the OpenSUSE build service or the F-Spot team PPA (packages will be up shortly).
More info
More info can be found in the full release announcement. This release would have not been possible without all the people (code from 18 persons!) that contributed to it. Many thanks to them. A full overview is in the announcement.
The bug list doesn’t open (get a “403 Forbidden”).
Anyway, it looks really promising. The 0.6.15 in Ubuntu 10.4 is already a big step forward and this seems even better. Are there any known gotchas with this version we should be wary of or would you recommend the upcoming build for daily use?
Bug link works for me, even in a different browser with no authentication.
The 0.7 series can be a bit more unstable (and this release supports a bit less RAW formats, so depending on what camera you use, it might not be usable [1]). That being said, it works rather well for me and should generally be usable, if you like a bit of adventure. If you run into issues, let us know and we’ll promptly look into them.
One thing to keep in mind is the fact that 0.7 is not backwards compatible: the database schema changed in 0.7.0 due to the new duplicate detection. This means you cannot go back to 0.6.x. Make backups first!
[1] The big ones: Canon, Nikon and Sony all work fine. It’s the obscure ones that are temporary broken.
Ruben, thanks. Um, by “Raw converter” you mean F-spot has a built-in one nowadays? I’ve always used UFRaw through the right-click menu to develop my raw files; is that option gone now?
I don’t think I mentioned conversion anywhere. This is purely about parsing metadata (for display / extracting data during import).
“Remove from camera” — wow, killer feature. I know this has been discussed for a loooooooong time and there may be reasons why it is really not a bad idea but it will improve my workflow a lot, so, thanks!
The /!\ button looks a bit strange, though.
Michael, be careful. The main reason this may not be a good idea is because buggy card drivers are quite common in digital cameras and other electronics. They work fine as long as the camera does the formatting and all file manipulation on the card (that’s what the manufacturer mostly tests). But when other devices – like your computer – does something to the card they may do things a little differently (legal and according to spec, just differently) and that can start triggering bugs that may leave you with lost images or an unreadable card somewhere down the line.
I never let anything else touch my memory cards for this reason. And it’s a really good idea to reformat the card if you move it from one camera to another too.
Looks great, thanks for your efforts.
Am wondering, where are you changing taglib-sharp? I follow mono-patches list and I don’t see your changes.
BTW, can F-Spot open multi-page TIFFs already?
Thanks
Our Taglib# work is in gitorious: http://gitorious.org/taglib-sharp
It lives in the photo-support branch. We are going to work on getting this merged with mainline Taglib# once it moves to git. Should be fully compatible though, there’s no API breakage compared to mainline Taglib# that I’m aware of.
Not sure how we’d make multi-page TIFF work, evince might be a better tool for that.
Hello Ruben,
that sounds great! Will F-Spot 0.8 support video files too (like Banshee did)? My girlfriend switched with their thousends of photos to Linux and like F-Spot a lot. She took a lot of videos with her camera too but can’t import/ view them in F-Spot. Many of these videos are depending on taken pictures too.
I don’t see it happening for 0.8. We are probably going to focus on getting photo support to work well. In time we probably will, but currently it’s rather low on the priority list.
Once the architecture is reworked a bit it should be much easier to add this.
It would be nice to have a checkbox on F-Spot’s Importer to auto rotate images. Some people like them the way they are, and many people like them auto rotated. Having the check box would allow for both choices.
THANK YOU! for adding “remove from camera” and for clarifying why this could be a bad thing to do. Over the years with several cameras, I’ve never had an issue with mounting cards and manipulating images directly, manually deleting via the cameras UI would be a huge PITA.
Is the “remove originals after import” operation also available for PTP connections? And would it also be risky for this type of connections? From my understanding, the “buggy card drivers” problem should not apply here.