F-Spot - Use Cases

Isztwan is an unemployed musician who likes to take pictures with his compact digital camera. It’s his second digital camera and he took over 10,000 snaps since. He likes to travel a lot and always takes the camera along. Because it’s so compact sized, he’s taking it along when he plays with his band at various clubs around Hungary. He’s taking pictures of everything he sees. He always relies on the automatics of the camera and doesn’t think too much about lighting conditions or composition.

Isztwan lives in a block of flats on the top floor, with access to the roof with pretty spectacular view. The cam he’s using now is a Sony DSC-F77 which can be accessed from Linux in PTP mode using the gphoto2 software.

Isztwan was looking for an application to manage his library of photos. He has stored his photos on his big 120GB hard drive and split the set into folders to fit on a DVD-R. He has 5 folders named photos-1 to photos-5. He put them in a folder called media where he also stores various other pictures and videos.

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. He has been using gphoto2 commandline tool to grab the contents of the camera before, but is interested if there is a possibility to import the images directly into f-spot.

1. After a successful import of his approximately 10 000 photos, Isztwan is left with a flat list of photos he wants to categorize. He wants to mark the individual sets by event or location they were shot at.
2. Some shots are improperly exposed beyond fixable, poor composition or similar that Isztwan wants to delete them straight away. Sometimes Isztwan regrets his implusive voice in his head telling him “NUKE IT, DUDE, IT SUCKS!” and would like to undo his decision.
3. With some pictures, Isztwan doesn’t like them at all, but has a feeling he may want to go back to them and use them in future. Or they poorly depict a moment Isztwan feels strongly about. Isztwan would like to remove those pictures from the library, with a possibility to get back to them in a (far) future.
4. While browsing images in preview mode, Isztwan likes to add more attributes to particular open image. He adds people he knows on the shot
5. Isztwan wants to mark the latest images as Gigs>Szabor. He also wants to label all shots according to what band members appear on them. He also marks the over and underexposed images to fix them later, when he get more time.
6. Isztwan has a number of photos taken by his friends at various gigs and events. He always asks them if he could copy those before heading home. He’d like to be able to mark those images to be able to query his library by author. Unfortunately his camera, nor the ones of his friends stores such information in EXIF headers. He already has images by his friends in the library and is able to find them querying for events.

1. Because Isztwan’s composition is rarely optimal, he likes to go through his photos and do a lot of cropping. He would like to retain the originals though, since sometimes he feels like changing his mind and crop the image otherwise.
2. Isztwan found some time to fix his bad shots. He marked them “fixme” so he can just run a query to get the list. Some need to get the tonal range fixed, some have color casts, some are a bit unsharp thanks to the flaky autofocus and some because the exposure was too long for Isztwan to hold steady.
3. Isztwan made some really nice shots of from the top of the roof. He’d like to stitch the photos into a single panoramatic picture.
4. Isztwan has a photo that’s slightly tilted and he’d like to fix the horizon easily.

1. Isztwan wants to find a good picture of the whole band to put on a back of the cover of their latest demo CD. He intends to query the whole library for picture that include himself, Gabor, Gabriel and Ingo.
2. Gabor comes over to visit Isztwan. Gabor wants to buy an older digicam second hand. Because Isztwan used to have that model before getting the f77, Gabor is interested in seeing some sample shots Isztwan made with it. Isztwan didn’t create a special tag for the camera model, but the images should have that information stored in an EXIF header.
3. One of Isztwan’s neighbors was robbed sometime last year. The Hungarian police didn’t bother to investigate until today. They came knocking on the floor asking Isztwan what he’s been doing on 25th of August last year. Instead of admitting he has absolutely no clue, Isztwan looks at his photo library if that may give him some clue where he’s been during that time and perhaps give him some alibi. Isztwan recalls being stupid and not setting his camera clock right for a lot of the shots. He may be interested in querying for the file creation date too.
4. Gabor comes to see Isztwan with a request. He hands Isztwan a usb-ring with an unsharp shot of Gabor from some gig they both don’t quite recall. Gabor asks if perhaps Isztwan doesn’t have a sharp version of this. The picture was taken from the web of their fan and contains no EXIF information.

1. Isztwan wants to backup his photos to DVD-Rs. He wants to query for pictures that haven’t been backed up yet. Isztwan has no idea how many shots fit onto one DVD.
2. Isztwan wants to get his favorite pictures printed. The print shop includes a web interface that accepts uploading of individual images though a web form. Another option is uploading the whole set as a zip archive.
3. Isztwan wants to put up a web gallery of some of the pictures. He would like it to be searchable just like from f-spot.

1. Isztwan is bored of his desktop wallpaper. He wants to have some Spring wallpaper.
2. Isztwan is mailing his girlfriend if she wants to join them on the weekend for the gig in Kagh. He wants to attach an image of the club to the mail. He’s using Ximian Evolution.