Trisha Shetty (Editor)

F Spot

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Original author(s)
  
Ettore Perazzoli

Written in
  
C# (GTK#), C++

F-Spot

Developer(s)
  
Larry Ewing, Stephane Delcroix, Gabriel Burt, Ruben Vermeersch, Timothy Howard, Stephen Shaw

Stable release
  
0.8.2 / December 19, 2010; 6 years ago (2010-12-19)

Repository
  
git://git.gnome.org/f-spot, https://github.com/GNOME/f-spot

Operating system
  
Linux, BSD, Solaris, other Unix-like

F-Spot is an unmaintained image organizer, designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. The name is a play on the word F-Stop.

Contents

Features

F-Spot aims to have an interface that is simple to use, yet still supports advanced features such as tagging images and displaying and exporting Exif and XMP metadata.

All major photographic image formats are supported, including JPEG, PNG, TIFF, DNG and several vendor-specific RAW formats (CR2, PEF, ORF, SRF, CRW, MRW and RAF). Other supported file types are GIF, SVG and PPM. As of 2008, the RAW formats were not editable with F-Spot. However, newer releases of F-Spot have the DevelopInUFRaw extension, which calls on UFRaw for the conversion work, and then re-imports the resulting JPEG back into F-Spot as a new version of the original RAW.

Photos can be imported directly from the camera. The driver support is provided by libgphoto2. The GNOME desktop environment can also optionally detect if a camera or a memory card has been attached, and import images to F-Spot automatically.

Basic functions such as crop and rotate available alongside more advanced features such as red-eye removal and versioning. The rotate function allows for movements in single degree increments with autocrop, not just 90-degree adjustment. Color adjustments are supported with a histogram. They include an auto- improve and individual brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, and temperature.

Photo CDs can be created by selecting multiple photographs and selecting "Export to CD" from the main menu.

Photos in the F-Spot library can be uploaded to a number of online photo storage sites. F-Spot supports two major gallery sites, Flickr and Picasa Web Album, and also using stand-alone web gallery software, including Gallery and O.r.i.g.i.n.a.l. F-Spot can also generate static web gallery sites and export to Facebook. F-Spot automatically downsizes photos before exporting to Flickr, and though the F-Spot web site describes this as "optional," there is no option to not downsize photos before export.

Technical information

F-Spot is written in the C# programming language using Mono.

When images are imported into F-Spot, they are written to disk. The folder is /username/Pictures/Photos/[year]/[month]/[Day]. This appears to be undocumented. When the images have been modified in F-spot, the program Commonist can be pointed to this folder and the images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in the normal way.

The F-Spot project was started by Ettore Perazzoli and is now maintained by Stephen Shaw.

F-Spot is the standard image tool for several GNOME based distributions. However Fedora replaced F-Spot with Shotwell in Fedora 13. Ubuntu has done the same as of 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

References

F-Spot Wikipedia