This means that TagLib# (used by Banshee, F-Spot and others) can now serve as your one-stop .NET library for handling audio, video and image metadata. And did I mention that it’s deliciously open-source, making it usable in any project you’d like?

Download
Source-Code and more info

This is quite significant: aside from audio and video files, Taglib# is now capable of handling metadata embedded in a large range of image formats.

Some nice features:

• Support for JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF and a large number of RAW image formats.
• Full support for XMP and EXIF (no IPTC yet).
• Fully implemented in managed code, so instantly cross-platform.
• Extremely capable (exposing all the internal metadata structure if you want), but with an additional convenience API if you don’t want to deal with the pain.
• And obviously, deliciously free software, for any purpose you want!

However, the best feature in my opinion is built-in paranoia. All of this code has been tested to the extreme, with over 33.000 lines of unit tests. We test things like data consistency across read/write scenarios, parsing correctness and completeness and generally avoid regressions. Everything is also cross-validated with specifications and the exiv2 library.

If we are only slightly unsure about how to parse some bits of data, Taglib# will flat-out refuse to write to the file. This is important: when dealing with people’s digital memories, you do not want to risk data-loss.

If you’re looking for a feature-full, well-tested and fully-managed .Net library for metadata, this might be the solution for you.

Many thanks to Mike Gemünde for his efforts, this work is just as much of a result of his labor as it was of mine.

The Heads, Knysna, South-Africa (A very enjoyable place to relax!)

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 aim is to have a usable, complete and solid metadata library. This includes extensive unit testing (to the extreme). If we will handle your files, we want to guarantee that it will be done correctly.

All of this can be found on Gitorious. The code is in the photo-support branch of the mainline repository, master is a copy of the SVN repository for upstream Taglib#. Currently we support JPEG and TIFF, with Exif and XMP (see the wiki for more details). We plan to expand this to every other format out there. More instructions on how to get the code and test it can be found here.

So what’s the plan here? First, we will improve the git version as is. When it is ready, we will then start embedding it into the F-Spot tree (while keeping the main repository synced in gitorious), to let it mature. Over time, we’ll be working with upstream to have it merged back. I have already talked with Gabriel Burt about this, so this “fork” won’t stay around forever.

We are looking for people that want to help us out. By testing it (to make sure we handle your files correctly) and off-course by hacking on it. Much to my surprise, I noticed that writing a metadata library isn’t all that hard, so you don’t have to be a superhero hacker to be able to do something useful.

Want to help out? Hop onto IRC and join #f-spot (on irc.gnome.org), come and talk to me (rubenv) or Mike (tigger).