Two by Two
I released F-Spot 0.2.2 today. It’s better than ever so drop everything and give it a whirl.
So much has been happening the world of F-Spot that I won’t try to cover everything now. I do however want to touch on a few highlights. Most visibly, the work Gabriel Burt has been doing on a new query interface has finally become part of F-Spot. You can find a good description of the new interface at his blog and if you were lucky enough to be at the Boston summit you may have seen his demo. The new interface is major improvement over the old but expect several revisions as we try to streamline and polish it.
The query interface is hardly the only thing new in 0.2.2, Stephane has been fixing so many problems large and small that it is hard to keep up with him. This includes doing the work to move F-Spot to the new managed dbus-sharp bindings. So if you were having dbus related problems before it would be a good time to try things out again. Of course if you start having problems please speak up.
That’s all I have time to cover for now but there is much more I’ll go over in the future. Until then enjoy the new release and a little bit of fall.
October 12th, 2006 at 3:08 pm
I tried f-spot about a year ago, asking it to import my digital photo collection: several thousand pictures, about 2Gb worth. My poor machine went into a swapping frenzy, as if f-spot were trying to have all the photos in memory at once. It also made a copy of each photo (up to the point where my computer ran out of gas and the OOM killer kicked in). I deleted the app from my system.
Should I give it another chance? Does f-spot now deal sanely with large numbers of images?
October 12th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Absolutely give it another chance. Several thosand images should be no problem at all, in the tens of thousands you may begin to notice some of the filtering operations slowing down, but if it is anything more that a small lag please file a bug. One of the primary goals of f-spot is to deal with large collections.
The specific problem you mention sounds like a very old bug in the import code where mono was extremely slow garbage collect image buffers because it isn’t aware of the actual amount of memory they are using. It has been solved for a long time by being more more explicit and not relying too much on the garbage collector in places where we know there are issues.
F-Spot is by no means flawless and it never will be. That said I’m sure you’ll find it has improved a great deal since you last tried, and I hope you’ll find using it a more pleasurable experience. Give it a try, let me know how it goes, and I’ll continue to do my best to improve it.
October 13th, 2006 at 7:55 am
Joe, my F-Spot catalog contains a little over 15 000 photos. While applying tags to many images takes some time, I’m still able to browse and view them pretty fast and filtering helps a lot.