My first concern came when I asked F-Spot to "import" my pictures. For my 1gig of images it already took too much time. How would that have played out for my 50+gigs of pictures. Besides, F-Spot did not import my *jpe* files. These files are created by my camera when I take a picture along with the raw file. These files are regular jpg files but for an unknown reason, Minolta decided to give them an *.jpe extension. Under Picasa or Digikam they are recognised as regular jpegs and treated accordingly. Not F-Spot. Not a big deal however as F-Spot can read raws, but even that has some serious limitations.

The first thing I noticed when accessing my pictures is the inability of F-Spot to rotate my raw pictures appropriately. It is a shame as most of them are vertical. That fact alone would be a break-dealer, but worse, I was not able to manually rotate them. In fact I didn't find how I could apply (let alone save) an edit on any raw file. A severe limitation that render F-Spot almost useless for me. Of course regular jpegs or pngs were rotate according to the exifs.

On the tagging front however, F-Spot works flawlessly and I was able to tag all my pictures regardless of their format. One nice thing is that the tag takes for its icon the first picture you tag and subsequently, this small "iconized" picture is put under each new picture you mark. You can then very easily see which pictures have which tags. However, I would advise keeping the number of tags per picture to a minimum because it is a bit messy when a picture get 5+ tags.

To filter pictures by tag is very easy and each tag is simply added to a general filter above the picture selection window. The operator used is or which is nice (I want all the pictures with myself or paris for instance). But there is no way to use the and operator (myself and paris). Note however that this holds true for Digikam as well. However the design of the filter in F-Spot bears more promise than in Digikam and will probably proved to be more flexible in future development.

On the editing tools choice is very limited (to the basic) a bit à la Picasa. However the sharpen tool for instance has been very nicely thought and the feedback you have through this "virtual" maginifier on/off is truly interesting. You may as well install some extensions. One is about making jpeg and raw with the same file name, one single picture (very interesting) and the second is to implement some kind of versioning. However as F-Spot failed to recognize my "jpe" files the first extension was useless and I was unable to make the second work.

My final conclusion is that F-Spot is a nice tool but with a very limited breadths and some missing bits : management of 14bits raws, no color management, no tagging hierarchy among other things. My feeling is that despite lacking the polish of Picasa it does bring tagging on the table and as such is worth considering if you do not plan to manage raw files. It does not however match with Digikam and is probably not addressing the same needs as well.

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