Due to the proliferation of inexpensive digital cameras and the ever-increasing size of flash-based memory cards, it’s more and more common to shoot and keep a large number of digital pictures. Even the occasional photographer likely has thousands of photos, and the number only goes up from there. To make matters worse, in most cases, the vast number of pictures are unsorted, uncategorized, and scattered around your filesystem. How can one help tame this seemingly unmanageable digital mess? Enter F-Spot, a full-featured personal photo management application for Linux. F-Spot simplifies digital photography by providing intuitive tools to help you share, touch-up, find, and organize your images. Written in Mono, F-Spot is licensed under GNU Public License version 2, and is available for download from http://f-spot.org/.
Since F-Spot is distributed by almost all major Linux distributions through their respective packaging systems, you probably have the application and needn’t install it. The full source, however, is available if you choose not to use apt, yum, or your favorite package management tool.
FIGURE ONE: The F-Spot interface
The first time you launch F-Spot, you are prompted with an “Import” dialog box. This can be a little confusing — F-Spot is really asking for the location of your pictures so, it can add them to its database. F-Spot can also optionally copy your pictures to a central location, if you want to keep the originals in situ. After selecting a folder of images, you should see a…
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