F-Spot: An iPhoto Replacement for Linux

When looking at photo management applications, iPhoto, the photo management application by Apple, has fast become a standard (or at least a standard template) for other programs. Linux has three applications that follow iPhoto's general look and feel - Digikam (for KDE), Picasa (from Google), and F-Spot (for Gnome). This review will go over one of the newest of these programs - F-Spot.

One of F-Spot's greatest "selling" points is its incredibly simple interface. There are very few buttons, sliders, check boxes or icons in the main interface. All you are presented with is a timeline at the top of the window, to show groups of photos and when they were added to the library, a side bar on the left of the window that shows different collections, and then - the largest part of the interface - the photos themselves. While F-Spot could have chosen to present every available option in the main interface (much as Microsoft Word presents its users with dozens and dozens of buttons), only the most commonly used options are visible in F-Spot.

When browsing, photos can be looked at either by date added to the library or by tags. Tags are similar to the albums in iPhoto, and are simply a way of organizing photos by any category the user wishes. For instance, if a number of photos were taken at a birthday party, the tag "birthday party" could be added. Then, if - at a later date - more pictures were taken at a different birthday party, the same tag could be added, and all photos would be in the same place. For further refinement, more than one tag can be added.

F-Spot supports the most popular file formats as well, including jpeg, fig, ping and svg, as well as uncompressed formats such as tiff and raw. This allows F-Spot to truly be a library of ALL your photos, and not just photos that come from certain sources.

One more great feature about F-Spot is its import abilities. While many programs are able to import photos directly from a spot on the hard drive, as well as from an attached digital camera, F-Spot is able to import photos from an unlikely source: a photo iPod. Since many people are using newer model iPods to store and show off their photo collection, F-Spot's developers decided it would be a nice feature for F-Spot to be able to import those collections.

Like iPhoto, F-Spot can also view photos at different sizes (from very tiny all the way to full-screen), as well as give the viewer options for viewing. Photos may be viewed as part of the overall library, or within a certain tag, or simply one at a time. Viewing pictures in a slide show is also possible, with the duration of viewing time per slide completely configurable by the user.

Also similar to iPhoto is the number of photo enhancement options available from directly within F-Spot. Photos can be rotated, cropped, resized, and simple adjustments (for red eye and other color settings) can be done from within F-Spot, so opening a dedicated photo editor (like GIMP or Krita or Photoshop), is not necessary. In addition, users have the option of turning on something called Versioning. With Versioning turned on, the original photo is not touched - all changes are made to a copy, so no matter what artistic changes are made, the original file is still available should changes be desired at a later time.

One of the "requirements" photo management seems to have in today's world is that it also facilitate photo sharing as well as viewing. F-Spot takes that mandate seriously, and gives a user many options. As well as being able to export a library to a page of thumbnails or html, photos can be burned to a Photo CD, as well as uploaded to Flickr, 23, Picasa Web or SmugMug.

Another great feature is that data is written to the actual image files. What this means for the user is that should something go wrong, all the tagging and meta data information for those photos is not lost in a proprietary database, such as is used by iPhoto and other non-open-source programs.

One of the disadvantages F-Spot has is its desire to copy all your photos into one central location. This has been addressed in a newer version of the program, to a certain extent. Before, if a photo was already present in the official library, it would be copied. Now, the photo - as it is already where it should be - is left alone. Still, it would be nice if the photos could simply exist where they are, and F-Spot would just keep track of them. For some people with a large number of photos, this could be a problem, but not a deal-breaker, as far as I'm concerned.

Again, F-Spot is still a new program. It is currently at version .0.3.5, and is being updated very often (five times already in 2007), so issues are addressed as quickly as the developers can fix them. All in all, F-Spot is definitely a program I would recommend. It isn't exactly the same as iPhoto, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.