Hello, I have just installed Ubuntu 9.10 alongside Windows. Very very impressed so far, in particular the way it downsized my windows partition and that it can read the Windows C: drive, and picked up all my settings from windows etc. This was the tipping point that made me switch over to Ubuntu. I was up and running in under 60 mins. My parents have even used it (they are over 60).
A few sticking points with f-spot though. I like the features and it seems fast so I'd like to overcome these problems. The documentation states "By default, F-Spot copies your photos to the ~/Photos folder". Not so. The default is ~/Pictures. Not so bad until I saw that ~/Pictures/Photos exists. I plugged in my camera anyway and imported and I noticed that each picture was going into ~/Pictures/Photos temporarily one by one, and then being moved up into ~/Pictures. Thats fine but could ~/Pictures/Photos be called ~/Pictures/.tmp or something hidden from the user, and the Documentation corrected to say ~/Pictures not ~/Photos ? Its confusing for the first time user. When the camera download finished, it stuck all my pictures in one directory ~/Pictures rather than by date directory as I've been used to. My first impression was that it had messed up and it hadn't read the picture time stamps from my camera correctly. I hunted around (for an hour) and this seems to be the f-spot 'way'. Could this be stated at the beginning of the 'Import' page documentation then please? I like this way but a sentence like "F-Spot stores all your photos in one big single directory and uses a database to organise them. We think this is better than storing picutes by date folder." would be most welcome to see there if that is indeed what F-spot does. Yes the documentation states it used a database and tells you how to read it using sqlite3, but its not clear that it uses a database _instead_ of date directories. Even now I'm not sure about this and maybe its an option somewhere. I wanted to import pics from external hard (Buffalo Linkstation 250GB CIFS). Ubuntu file browser can see it no problem - I didn't need to install samba. But the Import screen in F-spot shows just 2 options under the "select folder" menu title : my windows partition and my camera. After an hour of reading documentation and searching web, by accident I discovered that "select folder" is not actually a menu title but actually a 3rd choice. Click it _again_ and a folder browser appears. [It would be better if 'select folder' was moved to the drop down list, the line break removed to stop it looking like a title, and any camera made the default] However that 'select folder' window still doesn't show my external drive! In the end I used Ubuntu file browser to copy one folder containing 30 pics taken in 2005 called 0001 from my external hard drive to ~/Pictures/Photos/0001. F-sport imported them and I unticked 'copy files' option thinking it was ok to leave them there. But it has messed up the timestamps i.e. some photos I took last month on my camera are now showing in f-spot as images from 2005. I'm not confident that F-spot has oranised my pics properly as it looks as if its overwritten my pictures taken recently. Should I have copied 0001 to /tmp instead and let f-spot do its stuff ? How do I delete or start-over my F-spot database as it seems to be now currupted. As this is my first email to any Ubuntu forum, please let me know if the points above should be raised elsewhere or if these points are appropriate to raise specific bug reports. Regards, Matthew _______________________________________________ F-spot-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/f-spot-list
