1. Isztwan runs F-Spot for the first time. He needs to import his sets of pictures into the library. He doesn’t exactly now how many he got, but has only about 20 minutes before he needs to leave. He wants to do this in one go and wants to know if he can turn off the computer before leaving. It may also be, that the library includes thumbnails created by other software.
2. Isztwan has over 10,000 images in his library and imports a batch of 200 images from a CD and about 50 from his camera. He wants to have a history of recent imports so he can easily get back to these images and categorize them.
3. He also has returned from a small gig the band had in a nearby town Szabor. He’s interested how the images look at full resolution, since the autofocus is sometimes flaky in low light conditions and he hates the internal flash.

Isztwan needs to wait until all pictures are imported. There is no time indication to tell him how long the process will take. The images aren’t really moved anywhere, just added to the f-spot database. All images are imported including the thumbnails and possible size variations of the same photo (duplicates).

Currently there is no way to track sets of imported images.

At this moment the import dialog is modal and there is no way to work with the photo library while pictures are imported.

• Background. The import process is usually pretty long, therefore it is desirable for it not to be blocking. People will want to start working on images while the rest is being imported.
• External Imports/Keeping in Sync. The actual import doesn’t need to be handled by F-Spot at all. On the GNOME desktop there are already means to import pictures from the camera (see below).
  • We will need a standard Photo Directory ($PICTURES=$HOME/Pictures, $IMPORT_PICTURES=$HOME/Pictures/Imports).
  • gThumb/libgphoto2 will prompt me with a dialog to import images to $IMPORT_PICTURES as soon as I attach a camera that uses PTP.
  • Attaching a usb-mass-storage camera will mount the memorycard and show a little drive icon on the desktop. It could automatically figure out from the directory structure that the mounted device is a camera and prompt the user to import image to $IMPORT_PICTURES similar to what gthumb does
  • We could have a libgphoto utility doing simial job as gthumb.
  • F-Spot needs to check the consistency of its database vs the $PICTURES directory after start-up and while running.
• Physical structure.

• Evolution also has a pseudo-modal fetch mail dialog. It really is non-blocking, but it appears as if it was. It should just use the status bar even when pressing the send/receive button.