Appreciating F-spot
October 19, 2008 by Clair Ching
Filed under How To
I’ve never really appreciated F-spot because I mainly use Flickr and postr to manage my images. On my external hard drive, I just have a bunch of images and I don’t usually bother to add tags to them until I upload them to Flickr.
Image by Clair Ching, 2008.
Recently though, I’ve been messing around with F-spot. You could do a lot of things with F-spot: tag your images, add comments, upload them to your online image album services. It could be seen as a one-stop app for your image management needs.
To begin using F-spot, you need to import your image directories to it. This is for F-spot to recognize where you store your images and load them. This way you could see your images and it would help you in choosing them as you manage them.
Importing directories. Image by Clair Ching, 2008.
Once you’re done with importing the directories, you could begin by tagging the images. Click on the image you want to add tags to. You could have a hierarchy of tags, by the way. And one more thing about tags: the first image with whom you associate the tag becomes the tag’s default icon/image.
Tagging images. Image by Clair Ching, 2008.
I was really amused with the instant editing that could be done on F-spot. Transforming images to black and white or sepia might take quite a number of mouse gestures and clicks on Gimp but once you load the image on F-spot, you could click the Edit Image button and voila! Your basic image editing buttons will show up on the lower part of the application’s window.
Editing an image on F-spot. Image by Clair Ching, 2008.
And you could upload images to Flickr, Picasa or whatever it is you’re using. Well, at least there are some services supported by F-spot. You could just choose among them and then upload the files. If you have added a comment and tags to the image, you could have them uploaded along with the image as long as you choose not strip the images of their metadata.
Importing images to Flickr. Image by Clair Ching, 2008.
I used to think that F-spot is too cluttered. But after several weeks of using it on and off, I’ve come to appreciate it more. And I hope you did too with this blog etry.
