Loudmouthman

On a previous post I mentioned the frustrations of interfaces which don’t  meet your expectations, so its a pleasure to write about an application which “out of the box” meets them.

F-Spot , credited to Novell inc , is a photo-manager ‘lite’ for the Ubuntu desktop user. It has allowed me able to collate my Photos and begin the task of managing and tagging and collating them. Nothing much of exception here, and thats the point , its software that is simply working as I expect it to and its getting the job done for me. The Tagging scheme enables me to sort and sift the images. I can edit ,rotate, crop and colour adjust the images storing the modified and or the original content within the gallery.

Importing the images from my SD Cards, CD Roms and network connected drives was easy and the import process provides the means of tagging the incoming images. The process gives you the option of Copying the Photo from its source to the F-spot Photos directory where it will create its own directory structure to store images into. One gripe which I will post a equiry about is that where images with similar names in differing directories dont appear to have been imported. Once imported the images are visible as a grid of images recovered in either a linear date format or folder naming scheme.
Like many other technically minded folk I run my own photo gallery software, to organise my images and photos. F-Spot integrated well with Gallery allowing me to highlight the one or many images and Export them direct to the Gallery and sub folders within that gallery.

Both the above packages are avilable through your Synaptic package manager and as expected the Versions levels of the packages is not likely to be the same as the release available directly from the source Websites.  So okay this package is no iPhoto or Picasa but then i gain more from the freedom that the software offers me in knownig what it is doing to my pictures.

Well here we are Summer ending and Autumn on its way. Youve had your holidays and snapped more memories than youve bought photo albums for. So what is there available to help you manage and co-ordinate your digital memories ? Lets look at three.

For Windows: Picasa http://picasa.google.com/
Picasa, from Google gives windows users the a great image catalogue and management suite. With a good range of image editing tools and export features Picasa is the must have image archiving tool for the discerning Windows user.

For Apple Mac: iPhoto http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/
Like many things from Apple the iPhoto tool provides a means with which a Apple owner can rely upon. As before this out of the box tool enables you to manage, edit and export your memories.

For Ubuntu – Linux : F-Spot http://f-spot.org

A great example of what the community continues to deliver and excel in , F-Spot was yet another Out of the box application which for me delivered on my needs to just get the job done.

This page is created to compliment the Weekly handouts provided by Nik Butler of the Reduced Hackers at the Friday morning Chapter meeting of the BNI , Flagship Gatwick. if you are interested in knowing more about these meetings and how your business can benefit from new sales opportunities then write to me or check out the BNI website to discover your local chapter.