F-spot Image Management
Manage your ocean of images with F-spot
Saturday, October 15th, 2005
Images. Oodles and oodles of images. Images coming out of your ears. Images scattered all over your hard drive. Images added daily from digital cameras, scanners, web pages, email attachments. Images everywhere, relentlessly growing in numbers! How can your organize such an insane glut of images? Help!
In the last few years, a variety of tools have made their debut, all designed to help computer users manage the surfeit of JPEGs that everyone seems to be accumulating in ever-greater numbers.
Mac OS X users have
iPhoto (
http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/), which possesses that usual Apple combination of power and elegance.
Windows users have
Picasa (
http://picasa.google.com), Google’s ultra-slick, newly-free entry into photo-management. (Rumor is that Picasa runs under
WINE, but you didn’t hear that one here). But what about devotees of the Penguin? Do they have anything like Picasa or iPhoto?
In typical open source fashion, there are several options available for Linuxers, and they range in quality from “Just started, Give ‘em a chance,” to “pretty good,” to “sucks.” For instance,
KDE users have
Digikam (
http://www.digikam.org), which is slick and full-featured.
gThumb (
http://gthumb.sourceforge.net) is a fast, powerful
GNOME- based image viewer and organizer. And if you live on the Web,
Flickr (
http://www.flickr.com) is an excellent web-based
social software service for managing photos, probably the best option for those with broadband and the desire to share their work.
