Is there another way?

Dear Lazyweb,

I've been taking a lot of photographs for quite a while now. Since the start of the year I've taken nearly 10,000 shots, both good and bad, and I want to organise them. Now, being the hard-drive organiser that I am, I've got everything organised roughly by category (so, 'Events,' 'Holidays,' 'Wildlife' and so on) and then by date (the folders are named in the form "%Y-%m-%d $subject"). Importing stuff is a case of either dragging and dropping the folder from a memory card into the correct folder in Nautilus and then renaming it or, alternatively, using gThumb to move the photos from one lcation to another.

Once I've got everything on disk I want to be able to view the images, tweak them if necessary, put them in a slideshow and so on before uploading the ones I want to upload to Flickr or wherever else. And it's here that the trouble starts.

You see, whilst I'm a freedom advocate and I'd rather be using an Open Source tool to do what I want to do with my images, I find myself using Picasa.  Now, as it happens Picasa is a fantastic piece of software. It does what I want organisationally, allowing me to list my folders chronologically as well as allowing me to tag my images so that I can find a subset of all my photos with the click of a mouse. It has some excellent non-destructive editing tools (I'm a big fan of non-destructive phot editing because there's nothing worse than editing a photo and then coming back the next day and realising you could have done it better, if only you still had the original to work from). It even allows me to edit RAW files without putting them through a coverter first. Finally, it allows me to upload my images to my online Picasa albums and, via a plugin, to Flickr. Fantastic.

But it's not Open Source, and forme, whilst it's not a show-stopper, it's a big failing.

"Ah," I hear you cry, "but there's an Open Source alternative: F-Spot!"

Well, yes, dear reader, there is always F-Spot. But the truth is that I don't like it for a number of reasons:

1. It's in-built editing is pretty limited compared to what Picasa has to offer. Now, maybe that's an unfair thing to say, but the truth is that Picasa is pretty much the best free (as in beer) photo management software out there that I'm aware of (correct me if I'm wrong), so F-Spot really needs to compete.
2. It's written using Mono, and I'm not a big fan of Mono. Now, that's perhaps a slightly silly attitude to take – after all I don't complain if something is written in, say, C++ rather than C, but even now after several years and a lot of promises I'm not wholly certain that there isn't a Microsoft submarine patent lurking somewhere, ready to come and bite the Open Source community in its Mono-running arse.
3. It's slow. Often, when I'm doing an import, the F-Spot window will grey-out, which is Compiz's way of telling me that the app is not paying any attention to its UI (usually because it's busy).
4. It's a resource hog. When F-Spot is running my system runs at 30-50% CPU utilisation. Ask it to do anything – add a tag to a lot of photos for example – and that climbs to 50-80% utilisation. When you're using a laptop that means that your knees get uncomfortably hot.
5. Finally, a little bugbear really, but a significant one for me, who's already done some of his organisation with the whole folders-within-folders thing (which, lets face it, makes it easy to find things over a network): F-Spot doesn't let you view your photo folders chronologically or, indeed, at all. Everything seems to be lumped together in one big group that you then have to comb through. Though there's a time-line feature at the top of the index view it really doesn't when you know exactly what date and subject to look for.

So my question, dear lazyweb, is this: Is there an Open Source solution that's as good as Picasa? Is there a tool out there that will allow me to do what I do now in Picasa (the most important thing for me is the editing toolset, which is pretty comprehensive bar a few features that you really need the Gimp for, such as healing blemishes) but which is something with which I can happily tinker in my spare time?

If there isn't, I'm not massively concerned, at least not yet. I think Picasa's a fantastic piece of software and, were Google to ever open source it (even better if they were to make it cross platform rather than having it run on Wine) I'd be happy as a clam. I'm even open to the idea of trying to write my own Picasa/F-Spot replacement at some point, although I confess that I'd have to do a significant amount of learning to be able to produce something useful (though that said that's the beauty of the OSS community: someone out there will know how to do what I want to do; I just have to find them).

I await your answer, dear lazyweb, with bated breath.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 4:54 pm. It is filed under Photography, Uncategorized and tagged with dear lazyweb, f-spot, flickr, mono, open source, organisation, picasa, questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.