F-Spot: Alive and kicking!

Somebody dropped into #f-spot on irc.gnome.org a few days ago and asked:

“is f-spot development still active, or is it just the occasional patch here and there?”

Fortunately, the answer is yes, F-Spot is very much alive and kicking. It’s true, the pace was down for a period of time, mostly due to people getting precious time claimed by other obligations. Things are coming back up to speed lately and that’s what this post is all about.

Build problems: resolved
F-Spot was quite hard to build for some time, due to a dependency on gtk-sharp from SVN. On top of that, this led to bugs for some users. Two weeks ago, sde came in and fixed it all.

Building F-Spot should now work on all modern distributions, without the need to install libraries from source. You can get it at git://git.gnome.org/f-spot.

F-Spot and Git: the power of DVCS in action
We’ve set up an automatically synchronized copy of the F-Spot git repository on gitorious.org. This allows external contributors to branch and publish their work, in such a way that we can track it. This has paid off, as you can see over here: http://gitorious.org/f-spot/. There’s a buzz of activity with lots of cool branches being worked on. We love git, many thanks to the guys that made it happen, it’s making our work so much nicer!

What’s cooking
Here’s a short rundown of what people are working on (remember, this is all very experimental and beta, no promises on it ever getting released):

  • Mike Gemünde (tigger) is currently cleaning and refactoring quite a lot of IconView code. This will get our codebase into a much leaner shape, which will make future modifications much easier. He is also working on adding geotagging.
  • Paul Wellner Bou (piz) is working on a lot of stuff, including a nice extension that allows you to compare different image versions.

    Compare versions

  • Lorenzo Milesi (maxxer) is taking care of bugzilla. Incidentaly, he also blogged about all this stuff. This is not coordinated, but it does nicely confirm the extra buzz I was talking about.
  • Wojciech Dzierzanowski is working hard on Tabblo exporting to make it rock hard.
  • And as for myself: I’ve been prototyping some stuff related to progressive image loading and preloading. I’m also looking into RAW processing for my GSoC. All of this is going at a rather slow pace as I’m in the final stages of writing my masters thesis.

Many hands make light work
It’s true, F-Spot is far from perfect and we’re all too aware of that. Also, there’s so many cool features that we want in there, but haven’t found time to build it yet. But we all want to build the nicest photo app there is.

We want you to write code for F-Spot!

And you can help with that! If you know how to program, join us on IRC and feel free to poke me. Many hands make light work and currently most of our hands are already overoccupied. We have plenty of feature requests already, so unless you want to program them yourselves, you’ll probably just have to wait for it.

UPDATE: Due to me incorrectly parsing gitorious.org, I wrongly quoted Lorenzo as doing the Tabblo work. While he is helping to get it merged, it is Wojciech who deserves all the credit for the development, sorry for that!

18 Responses to “F-Spot: Alive and kicking!”

  3. Pavel

    If you want me to code for F-Spot, write it in Python or at least in Java.
    No C# code unless I am forced to it…

    Reply
  4. Author

    RubenV

    @Miika: We’re looking into that (as we hate it too). Improvements will come, but I can’t promise when.

    @Mats: Coming up, but it’ll take time. Step by step, we’ll get there, as it’s a lot of work.

    @Pavel: With a source base of over 80K lines, it’s quite hard to switch now :-). The choice for C# was made long before I even started contributing to GNOME, but I think it was because Java-Gnome was way too immature (it still is) and Python, despite what Python developers love to say, isn’t really suited for large long running desktop applications, due to it’s garbage collector. Anyway, that’s a different subject: it’s in C# because it was written in C#. If you don’t feel like contributing because of that, that’s okay. Plenty of other parts of the desktop that need love too.

    Reply

  5. jared

    the versions viewer is a great idea, I submitted an rfe about a way to view versions (a while back) but I like that implementation you mentioned better as it has code! whereas mine was just a visual mockup

    Reply

  7. Nyall

    Great news – I hadn’t been seeing much activity on the mailing lists and was getting worried things were slowing down, but this all sounds great. I’m really looking forward to the geotagging support!

    Reply
  10. Author

    RubenV

    @Tom: Banshee might be more of a place for that, not sure. Anyway, I don’t think there’s anyone working on that, so unless you find somebody who wants to do it (or do it yourself), I wouldn’t get my hopes up on it landing soon.

    @Piotr: Cool to see that there are F-Spot fans in Leuven as well :-)

    Reply

  11. Mats Taraldsvik

    @Tom, Ruben : Shouldn’t that be something Pitivi should handle? Banshee is not an editor – I think that feature request would fit better in a video editor app, like Pitivi.

    @Ruben :

    Great! What annoys me most, is that f-spot will view the raw-file with its own raw-settings, but when I open the image in the external raw-editor (uraw?), they are reset. An easy way to use f-spot’s raw-settings would be appreciated, until proper support is implemented! :)

    Reply

  17. shane

    Someone should mention here, that microsoft has Community Sources C#!!! So if that was a worry before it hopefully isn’t now! Get coding ! :)

    Reply

  18. Cor van den Berghe

    As soon as geotagging support is in I’ll dump Digikam!
    It’s not the tagging itself I miss, I miss the small map on which I can see where the photo was taken. For the geotagging itself I use Geotag ( http://geotag.sourceforge.net/ )

    Reply

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