With life work getting in the way, it’s been impossible for me to further maintain F-Spot. Fortunately, Stephen Shaw has offered to pick up the task. Expect new stuff soon.

Alternatively, check out Shotwell, which has been making excellent progress lately.

Good thing someone told me or I would have missed it. The interview (which I unfortunately can’t share) covers F-Spot, Mono, photography on the free desktop and my own experiences and advice on taking your first steps as an open-source hacker. Never expected it to be published after so long.

Update: Added a shot from the inside:

Hitting the F-Spot -- Jono Bacon grabs an oversized digital camera and puts Ruben Vermeersch from popular photo management tool F-Spot under the lens.

Awesome.

More info on his weblog.

Some highlights:

• A fix for the rather annoying “Value is greater than Int32.MaxValue or less than Int32.MinValue”-bug.
• A fix for the “DateTime.DaysInMonth”-crasher.
• Loads of fixes to improve the handling of CR2 files.

Contributors to this release (developers):

Martin Slota, Nuno Ferreira, Paul Lange, Paul Wellner Bou, Ruben Vermeersch, Tim Howard

Contributors to this release (translations, documentation):

Andrej Žnidaršič (Slovenian), Bruno Brouard (French), Carles Ferrando (Catalan (Valencian)), Cheng-Chia Tseng (Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong and Taiwan)), Christian Kirbach (German), Damyan Ivanov (Bulgarian), Daniel Mustiele (Spanish), Gabor Kelemen (Hungarian), Hannie Dumoleyn (Dutch), Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio (Basque), Joe Hansen (Danish), Jonh Wendell (Brazilian Portuguese), Jorge González (Spanish), Lucian Adrian Grijincu (Romanian), Maetinee (Thai), Mario Blättermann (German), Matej Urbančič (Slovenian), Mattias Põldaru (Estonian), Victor Vislobokov (Russian), Yaron Shahrabani (Hebrew), Yoshizumi ENDO (Japanese), Zdenek Hatas (Czech)

Many thanks to all involved! Full details can be found in the release announcement.

Update: Due to a small bug that slipped through in the release process, we had to roll 0.8.2 immediately afterwards. Sorry for that. Second release announcement.

Many months ago I started contacting all F-Spot contributors and now I am happy to announce that the process has been completed: F-Spot is now licensed under the MIT X11 license.

This allows us to freely share code with e.g. the Banshee project. In the long run it will mean less code duplication, more sharing and more awesomeness crossing over between the projects. Let the fun begin!

Some highlights in the new version

• A completely new import system, which solves most of the crashes and memory-hunger of the old one.
• A switch to Taglib#, which brings much more robust and safe metadata handling.
• New and improved duplicate detection.
• Reparenting (combining photos as versions of each other) with drag / drop.
• Completely new documentation.
• A remove from camera option.
• Monodevelop support.
• Photo panning using the mouse.
• Stability, performance, memory and usability fixes in a lot of places.

Full details can be found in the announcements of the unstable versions: 0.7.0, 0.7.1, 0.7.2, 0.7.3.

The future
We will continue to work on the 0.8 series and provide enhancements and bug-fixes for a long period of time. No new features will be added here, but we will put an effort into fixing existing problems. This ensures that there is always a working and good version of F-Spot available for end-users. In the mean time we start working on big and radical changes in the master branch of git, with periodical 0.9 development releases.

Getting the code
This release should become available through your normal distribution packages. For those who can’t wait: 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 can be found in the release announcement.

A word of thanks
None of this was possible without the army of people that helped building this:

Ademir Mendoza, Alex Launi, Anton Keks, Bertrand Lorentz, Christian Krause, Christopher Halse Rogers, Daniel Köb, Eric Faehnrich, Evan Briones, Gabriel Burt, Harold Schreckengost, Iain Churcher, Iain Lane, Lorenzo Milesi, Łukasz Jernaś, Mike Gemünde, Mike Wallick, Nick Van Eeckhout, Paul Lange, Paul Wellner Bou, Peter Goetz, Ruben Vermeersch, Tim Retout, Tomas Kovacik, Trevor Buchanan, Vincent Pomey, Wojciech Dzierżanowski

Special kudos to the translators (we have 12 fully complete translations and 37 translations with over 80% coverage):

Andika Triwidada (Indonesian), Andrej Žnidaršič (Slovenian), Aron Xu (Simplified Chinese), Bruce Cowan (British English), Bruno Brouard (French), Cheng-Chia Tseng (Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong and Taiwan)), Christian Kirbach (German), Claude Paroz (French), Daniel Nylander (Swedish), Filipe Gomes (Portuguese), Fran Diéguez (Galician), Gabor Kelemen (Hungarian), Joe Hansen (Danish), Jordi Mas (Catalan), Jorge González (Spanish), Kjartan Maraas (Norwegian bokmål), Mario Blättermann (German), Mattias Põldaru (Estonian), Michel Recondo (Brazilian Portuguese), Miloš Popović (Serbian), Sira Nokyoongtong (Thai), Wolfgang Stöggl (German), Xandru Armesto (Asturian), Yoshizumi ENDO (Japanese), Zdeněk Hataš (Czech), Милош Поповић (Serbian)

In this release you will find more bug fixes and some small improvements, but in general it should be a stable evolutionary release: if 0.7.2 was working well for you, than this one should not give you any trouble either.

Please give this some testing and report your findings in bugzilla. We will continue to maintain this series after the 0.8.0 release, but anything that can be fixed before is nice.

Getting the code
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 can be found in the full release announcement.

No big earth-shattering user-visible new features in this release: the focus has mostly been on fixing breakage and solidifying what we have. All of this to make sure that F-Spot 0.8.0 (the next release, in 4 weeks from now) will be stable and supportable over a long period of time. This will allow us to make big and radical changes during the 0.9 cycle, which starts together with the 0.8.0 release and will last for 6 months. More on that in a future post.

Get your hacking shoes on.

You can now build, develop and debug F-Spot in Monodevelop

From a developer point of view, there was a very big change though: F-Spot can now be completely built using the Monodevelop IDE. You still have to do the initial ./autogen.sh; make; make install to make sure all the native code is built, but afterwards everything can be done in Monodevelop.

We want to make it super trivial to dive in, similar to how things work in the Banshee Awesome Factory (Gabriel Burt gave a great talk about this at GUADEC 2010, check it out once the recording is online!). This is an ongoing process.

Getting the code
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 can be found in the full release announcement.

This also means that I will be available for hiring starting on October 1. If you are looking for a great GNOME hacker and have something exciting to offer [1]: I’m willing to talk and I will be at GUADEC next week. You can find my CV here.

[1] Note that this should not strictly be a GNOME hacking job: I’m interested if the job poses a good technical challenge and occasionally gives me the chance to fly around and meet interesting people. Bonus points if it allows me to work on GNOME-related technologies (desktop or mobile).

Leuven at night.

I will also be doing a short lightning talk about the state/future of F-Spot at GUADEC. Five minutes, so it’ll be extremely fast, but I’m around all week to discuss it in greater detail. Hope to see you all there!

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.