| F-Spot open source photo manager deemed "promising" |
May 24, 2005
A recent review hosted by Newsforge.com evaluates Mono-based F-Spot 0.0.12, a photo manager. Author Andy Channelle finds the budding app promising, though not quite up to par with commercial products, yet.
F-Spot, called Novell's answer to Windows-only Picasa, is still in the pre-release stages. Despite its immaturity, it is bundled with a number of other Mono-based apps in Novell's SuSE 9.3 Linux distribution. It does what a photo manager should -- help you organize, sort through, and move your digital pics -- plus a few other nifty tricks like cropping and "stripping out metadata" to reduce the bandwidth burden, says Chanelle.
"A comparison with mature software such as Apple's iPhoto and Google's Picasa might seem a little sadistic," Channelle writes, noting that the version 0.0.12 version number indicates a very young application. "And yet stacked up against those giants, it doesn't fare too badly."
According to Channelle, F-Spot is "stable and swift," and its organizational functionality is easy to use. Chanelle also found that F-Spot smoothly exports to HTML galleries, including the Flickr free photo sharing services, and that the photo manager burns "anything from a single image to the entire collection to CD without going outside the application."
Channelle found fault with F-Spot's less fundamental features. F-Spot's Timeline thumbnail display did not quite stack up to iPhoto's "elegant" Calendar. Also, Channelle notes that F-Spot's image manipulation tools, like the red-eye reducer tool, were "a little blunt at present" for use on his family photos -- particularly with an iffy, all-or-nothing "Undo" tool.
Overall, Channelle finds F-Spot "surprisingly useful," even at this earlier stage, and considers it a "promising" application.
Read more of Andy Channelle's review of the F-Spot photo manager -- and comments on his review -- at NewsForge.com.
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