Photography: F-Spot
Recently TUX has given quite a focus to digital photography, with digiKam covered in September 2005 and G-thumb in October 2005. This month we’re taking a close look at how to use F-Spot, a photo management application for the Gnome desktop.
F-Spot provides an extremely slick interface for organising, editing and sharing your digital photographs. It supports a myriad of file types and has excellent support for the various RAW formats usd by high-end SLR style cameras. Even on hardware that is modest by today’s standards, F-Spot performs well. It also has support for the gphoto2 library for interfacing with digital cameras.
When you first run F-Spot with an empty library you’re shown the import dialogue. To import photographs, chose the location from which you would like to import them from the ‘Import Source’ menu. Removable devices like cameras, USB flash drives and CD-ROM are shown in the drop down box, or you can choose ‘Select Folder’ and navigate to a location on your hard disk.
By default, F-Spot copies all imported files to a Photos folder in your home directory. You may wish to untick the box ‘Copy file to the Photos folder’ if you are accessing a photograph library over a network share and you’d rather not copy them locally.
F-Spot makes use of tagging and a timeline to help you organise your photo library. You can assign multiple tags to each photograph. Categories, and tags are alike except that categories are able to have sub-tags.
You can tag photographs in quite a few different ways. To tag by drag and drop, select a photograph or a group of photographs and drop them onto the tag in the sidebar. You can also reverse this by dragging and dropping a tag onto the photograph. Both methods work if you have multiple photographs selected.
You can also right-click on a photograph or a selected group of photographs and select tags from the context menu. The ‘Tags’ menu of the main application window will modify tags for the selected photograph or group of photographs.
Finally, my favourite method as the most convenient for mass tagging is to ‘tag as you type’. Hitting ‘t’ while a photo or group of photos are selected allows you to type tags into the pop-up box to be applied en masse. You can specify multiple tags by separating them with a comma. If you type in tags that don’t exist yet, F-Spot will create them.
F-Spot allows you to perform basic editing tasks within the application without needing to use an external editor. To enter the ‘Edit Photo’ view, double click on an image thumbnail or click the ‘Edit Photo’ button in the toolbar with a photograph selected. F-Spot always preserves your original image and all modifications are made on a copy.
This photograph was taken through tinted windows in an office building and so has turned out very drab. This can be helped by upping the contrast and saturation a bit. To correct colour on an image either click the small icon with three circles below the image in the Edit Photo view, or select ‘Adjust Color…’ from the Edit menu.
Here I’m increasing the exposure, saturation and constrast to brighten up the image until the colours look as natural as I can get them. The image is still a little unreal looking, but is a vast improvement over the very dull original.
If you don’t like your changes, you can always delete the modified version and revert to the original. Make sure ‘Modified’ is selected in the ‘Version’ box underneath the filename to the left. Select ‘File -> Delete Version’ to delete the modified image.
F-Spot includes tools to apply black and white or sepia tones to a photograph. These buttons are the last two located on the toolbar below the image. There is also a simple red-eye removal tool. To use it, zoom right in on one of the affected eyes and select the red area as precisely as you can. Then click the small icon of an eye on the toolbar below the image. Repeat with the other eye.
One of the most common adjustments I make to an image is cropping, either to centre the object I want to focus on or to remove unwanted elements. F-Spot’s crop tool is very simple to use. Drag a selection over the part of the image you would like to keep and then click the small icon that looks like a penknife below the image. If you would like to limit the selection to a certain aspect ratio, the dropdown box to the left of the crop icon contains a list of common ratios.
F-Spot makes sharing your photographs very easy with the ability to export to popular web gallery software and to create stand-alone galleries on disk and to CDROM/DVD.
Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) is an online photo management and sharing application. It’s a lot of fun, with great tools for managing your photographs and creating a network of friends with similar interests or location.
To export to Flickr, you will need to have created a Flickr account.
Select the photographs you’d like to export to Flickr, and then select Export -> Export To Flickr from the File menu. In the dialog that appears, click ‘Authorize’. F-Spot will launch your default browser and navigate to a Flickr page where you can give F-Spot permissions to read and write to your Flickr account. Click the large blue button labelled ‘OK, I’LL ALLOW THIS’.
Once you’ve done that, return to the f-spot application and click ‘Complete Authorization’. Now your f-spot application should send your selected photographs to Flickr when you click OK. Once these images have finished uploading your browser will be launched again and navigate to a Flickr page where you can add titles and comments to your images.
Flickr also uses a tag system, and you can choose to export your images with the tags intact by ticking the box Export Tags.
F-Spot also includes a tool for creating simple standalone web galleries. Select the images you would like to create a gallery for and then chose Export to Folder from the File menu. Type in a name for your gallery beside ‘Gallery Name’ and select ‘Create standalone web gallery’ under ‘Export Method’.
Once you’ve finished with this dialogue click OK. Your gallery is created and saved to the desktop. To view it, load the index.html file from the folder ‘Gallery’ on your desktop in a web browser. This gallery is quite simple but visually very striking.
Being able to back my photograph collection up to CD and DVD is very important to me. Those photographs are a record of many important events in my life and that of loved ones, and losing them in a hard drive crash would be painful. F-Spot provides a tool for exporting photographs to CD. To use it, select the photographs you’d like to back up and then choose Export -> Export to CD from the File menu. A dialog will appear showing you thumbnails of the photographs you’ve chosen. Click OK to confirm and F-Spot will copy the photographs to a temporary location and then display the Write to Disc dialog. Click the ‘Write’ button to start burning the CD. Once the burning process has finished, a dialog asks you if you’d like to eject the disk, and either make another copy or close the burning tool.
F-Spot is an excellent tool for managing photographs and the best program of it’s kind I’ve used on Linux, Microsoft Windows or Apple’s OSX. There is simply no competition for me as far as ease of use and features goes.
While we’ve looked at quite a few ways to organise and share photographs with F-Spot, this article by no means covers all of F-Spot’s features. To learn more about it, take a look at the F-Spot user guide at http://f-spot.org/User_Guide