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View Full Version : Digikam vs F-spot



Ms_Angel_D
November 25th, 2009, 02:32 AM
Cast your votes... ;)

gn2
November 25th, 2009, 02:34 AM
I've always used digikam and am very happy with it.
Never used F-spot.

qalimas
November 25th, 2009, 02:34 AM
Digikam. I prefer QT/KDE apps on my KDE :)

Eruaran
November 25th, 2009, 08:46 AM
KDE, Digikam and Gwenview for me. I insist on being Mono-free.

lovinglinux
November 25th, 2009, 10:34 AM
Digikam is far superior than F-Spot.

koleoptero
November 25th, 2009, 10:45 AM
Anything is superior to f-spot imho.

e-Gee
November 25th, 2009, 10:48 AM
F-Spot, don't like KDE apps on my Gnome desktop and I don't care if it is mono or not !

zagz
November 25th, 2009, 01:44 PM
Just another example of KDE apps crapping over the compitition, It's hard to beat digikam on any platform, let alone Gnome.

Mr. Devil
November 25th, 2009, 01:56 PM
F-Spot - KDE is not for me :)

John Bean
November 25th, 2009, 02:05 PM
F-Spot - KDE is not for me :)

Odd. I seem to be using Digikam quite happily on GNOME, it's in a completely different league from the abysmal F-Spot. It installs some KDE bits (as dependencies) that I don't want and would never use but that's a minor price to pay for the considerable benefits gained, especially since the KDE bits are invisible to my desktop and disk space isn't an issue in this day and age.

chucky chuckaluck
November 25th, 2009, 02:07 PM
i hate both of them. not that they're bad, it's just to me, using a program like that for photos is like getting a drink of water out of a fire hose.

zagz
November 25th, 2009, 02:11 PM
i hate both of them. not that they're bad, it's just to me, using a program like that for photos is like getting a drink of water out of a fire hose.

I'm going to start calling you Mr. Analogy.:D

gnomeuser
November 25th, 2009, 02:18 PM
I am very pleased with f-spot

koshatnik
November 25th, 2009, 02:20 PM
What if you think they both suck?

John Bean
November 25th, 2009, 02:21 PM
i hate both of them. not that they're bad, it's just to me, using a program like that for photos is like getting a drink of water out of a fire hose.
You'd need to define what you mean by "using [...] for photos" since you seem to be suggesting that you believe them to be overkills, which is certainly not my experience. Digikam is the nearest thing to proper DAM software I've found in the open source world but I'm always open to suggestions.

gnomeuser
November 25th, 2009, 02:22 PM
What if you think they both suck?

then you can avail yourself of the wealth of fine free open source applications in the repos, and vote other.. even if other is none.

MiCK.ca
November 25th, 2009, 02:29 PM
I have used digikam but never f-spot. to think that the ubuntu team is replacing gimp with f-spot. AAAGGH! understand the logic but f-spot? frankly gThumb is better than f-spot. but digikam is a classy app.

I hope the results of this pole is being passed on the the development team.

If the user of Ubuntu speak saying that they prefer one app and this app is suiting their purpose well...clearly it's user friendly...then include it instead of f-spot.

gnomeuser
November 25th, 2009, 02:59 PM
I have used digikam but never f-spot. to think that the ubuntu team is replacing gimp with f-spot. AAAGGH! understand the logic but f-spot? frankly gThumb is better than f-spot. but digikam is a classy app.


Digikam is not a viable option as it pulls in KDE. We are not going to be able to fit that on the CD. Regardless given it's KDE dependency it won't look or feel as being part of the default desktop nor will it act like one. Digikam is probably a fine application for Kubuntu but not for Ubuntu.



I hope the results of this poll is being passed on the the development team.


It won't matter, sanity shall prevail regardless of how hard the gimp/gthumb/anti-mono/kde fanboys spam any poll.



If the user of Ubuntu speak saying that they prefer one app and this app is suiting their purpose well...clearly it's user friendly...then include it instead of f-spot.

your logic is flawed, you assume you represent every user. You also ignore decades of study in usability when determining usable applications.

RiceMonster
November 25th, 2009, 03:00 PM
What if you think they both suck?

Then you vote "other".

koleoptero
November 25th, 2009, 03:04 PM
After seeing no negative comments on digikam, I have decided to give it a try. I already have most of it's kde dependencies installed probably because of k3b.

EDIT: No, it wants to install dolphin and konqueror too. LOL Aborted.

John Bean
November 25th, 2009, 03:52 PM
EDIT: No, it wants to install dolphin and konqueror too. LOL Aborted.

Yes, it does go a bit OTT on dependencies. On the other hand there's no reason to actually use any of the junk it installs...

I'd recommend you try it anyway; you can easily remove it again (along with the junk it installs) if you don't like it.

koleoptero
November 25th, 2009, 03:56 PM
Nah, I'll stick with gthumb. If I get a new pc sometime in the future I'll switch to kde and try it then.

Ms_Angel_D
November 25th, 2009, 03:56 PM
What if you think they both suck?

That's why I gave the option of other.


I have used digikam but never f-spot. to think that the ubuntu team is replacing gimp with f-spot. AAAGGH! understand the logic but f-spot? frankly gThumb is better than f-spot. but digikam is a classy app.

I hope the results of this pole is being passed on the the development team.

If the user of Ubuntu speak saying that they prefer one app and this app is suiting their purpose well...clearly it's user friendly...then include it instead of f-spot.

Unfortunatly I wouldn't know how to pass the poll onto the team, though I would like to provided we get more votes, if someone can tell me how please let me know.

I Just recently discovered digikam, I can never see myself using F-spot again. I understand the reasoning behind removing GIMP by default, but I really don't see how F-Spot is a viable replacement.

John Bean
November 25th, 2009, 04:03 PM
I understand the reasoning behind removing GIMP by default, but I really don't see how F-Spot is a viable replacement.

I don't think it's intended as a replacement, it's not as though anyone is adding F-Spot instead of GIMP. As it stands both F-Spot and GIMP are installed by default, in future GIMP will not be. Personally I'd have kept GIMP and dropped F-Spot, but that's just me.

nubimax
November 25th, 2009, 05:24 PM
Every time that I have tried to use F-spot it locks up my computer and I have to do a forced shutdown will give Digikan a try.
M.

Skripka
November 25th, 2009, 05:27 PM
I don't think it's intended as a replacement, it's not as though anyone is adding F-Spot instead of GIMP. As it stands both F-Spot and GIMP are installed by default, in future GIMP will not be. Personally I'd have kept GIMP and dropped F-Spot, but that's just me.

My question is:

Since WHEN was dropping advaced capable applications a sign of "mainstream maturity"? I don't know if the author or the interviewer or both are hitting some heavy substances...

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/11/giving-up-the-gimp-is-a-sign-of-ubuntus-mainstream-maturity.ars

bruno9779
November 25th, 2009, 05:31 PM
F-spot

I prefer Digikam, but I hate the way KDE apps integrate in GNOME

Mr. Picklesworth
November 25th, 2009, 06:18 PM
DigiKam has some amazing features, and it's also really fast. However, I like F-Spot's simplicity. It has a lot of potential springing from that design :)

One big problem with F-Spot right now is that the approach where we use tags for everything does not export to other services very well. I think they will need to conjur up a conventional way of managing events and locations at some point.

Oh, Digikam is also a KDE app and I'm a GNOME person. I'm happy using Lyx (which uses Qt), but things tend to behave nicer when they are all built for the same environment.

My bias: If I could in a click get all my F-Spot tags (with the awesome hierarchy retained), with icons, into Digikam, I would be able to give it a more hands-on evaluation. As is, I am kind of stuck with F-Spot given my big library of carefully tagged photos. The tags are attached to the actual files, but the hierarchies and icons are not stored (I don't think the format for that metadata allows that kind of information).

John Bean
November 25th, 2009, 06:59 PM
As is, I am kind of stuck with F-Spot given my big library of carefully tagged photos. The tags are attached to the actual files, but the hierarchies and icons are not stored (I don't think the format for that metadata allows that kind of information).
That's what makes apps like F-Spot a complete non-starter for me. Locking yourself to a non-standard representation of metadata in one app is not a good idea - been there, done that, cost me days of work; I'll never make that mistake again.

My images (both JPEG and DNG) have all metadata stored in the image files as XMP since several years from when I adopted iView MediaPro (on Windows) as my DAM program. Having since moved on to Ubuntu soon discovered that DigiKam not only read all the data correctly it also stores its own "non-standard" tag hierarchies in its own namespace in the XMP metadata, just as MediaPro dies, so making it available to any application or script that cares to use it. It was a totally painless transition from iView to Digikam, quite unlike my much earlier move from a propitiatory photo manager to iView.

diablomarcus
December 14th, 2009, 12:04 AM
Fspot started deleting my photos. That was enough. I'm using digikam now.

squilookle
December 14th, 2009, 12:19 AM
I'm don't use either, I just put my photos in folder and view them using a simple viewer. I hve had better. Experiences with digicam than fspot in the past.

BigCityCat
December 14th, 2009, 01:21 AM
digikam= no Mono.net

Same reason I prefer qt and KDE.

philip5
January 2nd, 2010, 01:16 AM
If you still use 9.10/Karmic and want to use the latest Digikam 1.0.0 (and kipi-plugins 1.0 that's almost a must have with Digikam) then you could grab the packages from my repo:

https://launchpad.net/~philip5/+archive/extra

The repo also have a bunch of other goodies.

I think Digikam rocks and is about as good as Adobe Lightroom, if not better and is still free and open source. Otherwise I would consider Rawstudio and not F-spot as a complement to Digikam.

Regards,

Philip

HappinessNow
January 2nd, 2010, 03:45 AM
Other.

Raw Therapee (http://www.rawtherapee.com/)

lasleym
January 2nd, 2010, 06:34 AM
F-Spot has always locked up on any pc combination we've had. Just d/l digikam, and aside from the KDE interface - it seems like a pretty slick program. No program (gThumb, F-Spot, nor DigiKam) will import photos though... not sure which hardware issue it is, but that's another, unrelated topic.

RPG Master
January 2nd, 2010, 07:51 AM
I FRIGGIN' LOVE DIGIKAM!!!

...

sorry :|

Really the only thing I'd change about it is moving it away from KDE libs and towards something more DE neutral.

How hard would it be for someone to do that? Because if it just used plain QT it would look fully integrated with both KDE and GNOME :D

Also, if F-Spot wants to compete it needs: XMP editing support, a good built in RAW editor, make it NOT mess with my directory structure :x

vishzilla
January 2nd, 2010, 09:15 AM
Digikam. Love it!

Keith_Beef
January 6th, 2010, 07:26 PM
I've been using F-Spot for a little over a year, but not intensively. I think I have maybe two to three hundred photos in the system, maybe 25% of those are tagged. This was mostly just as a kind of experiment, to see how easy it would be to use as a system, and how easily my kids (9 and 7 yrs old) could learn to use it.

It seemed OK, but the fact that it is based on Mono makes me want to choose a more free system, and the fact that it occasionally hangs my system makes me want to choose a more stable system.

I'll try out Digikam again (I've not even looked at it for years), and Gwenview... but what other options are there?

I'd like the system to:

handle all image formats, or at least RAW, JPEG, PNG, XCF and TIFF, keep metadata (tags),
manage multiple revisions of each image,
integrate well with Gnome,
work with external software (Gimp, ImageMagick, RawTherapee)


And of course: be fast, ergonomic, free!

Before F-Spot, I used Nautilus with scripts that I wrote to process images (using calls to ImageMagick and exiftools). My ideal photo manager would allow me to write my own extensions in any language... bash, perl, python (but hey, maybe one day I'll learn lisp, caml, haskell and or even C).

K.

ewr2san
February 3rd, 2010, 02:14 AM
I just tried f-spot and Meh.. No where near as usable as Digikam. Digikam is the perfect balance of capable, fast, and intuitive.

F-spot kept leaving me annoyed..

ahalin
May 3rd, 2010, 04:45 AM
F-Spot is too simplistic.

Digikam has good management tools, good editing tools and it "just works" even after upgrades or distro changes (as long as you have a separate Home partition or still have the database file and put the photos back in the same folder structure), it still works.

I JUST WISH IT CAME STANDARD WITH UBUNTU: I don't like the 87Mb download and I cannot get the .tar.gz files that come on Linux Format to work. :-(

ebro173
May 12th, 2010, 09:12 PM
I've only ever used F-Spot in Ubuntu. But, I'm trying to figure out if there is a better option. I like Gnome and want to stick with it. Reading over this thread I see I can use DigiKam at the expense of some space and having extra "unused" software/dependencies.

Maybe I'll give it a try. Problems I have with F-Spot are:

It doesn't export tags to PicasaWeb. This even if your settings are such that you are supposed to be storing tags inside the file - not sure about where XMP, ...

I'm not too comfortable with the interface. It seems really simple but it isn't totally intuitive for me.

Trail
May 13th, 2010, 03:48 PM
Digikam. No contest there.

The only other pretty good choice I had been using for a while was KPhotoAlbum. I had configured a layout that was pretty fast to tag images, but it was a little unintuitive and cumbersome to filter images based on tags. If it wasn't for Digikam I'd still be probably using it.

Dixon Bainbridge
May 13th, 2010, 04:42 PM
I think both apps are pretty poor. F-Spots dedicated catalogue tagging and organisation is horrible and digikam's interface is clumsy at best.

Overall, the best free photo management app on linux is picasa, but that is no longer being developed for the platform, which is a shame. With a few more editting features it would be nearly perfect.

If you're serious about photography on linux then get Bibble or LightZone, which are far superior apps and have native Linux clients. Yeah they cost money, but they are worth it.

Keith_Beef
May 27th, 2010, 12:04 AM
I think both apps are pretty poor. F-Spots dedicated catalogue tagging and organisation is horrible and digikam's interface is clumsy at best.

Overall, the best free photo management app on linux is picasa, but that is no longer being developed for the platform, which is a shame. With a few more editting features it would be nearly perfect.

If you're serious about photography on linux then get Bibble or LightZone, which are far superior apps and have native Linux clients. Yeah they cost money, but they are worth it.

I've been looking at both Bibble's and LightZone's websites over the last few days... They look good, as they should for the amount they cost: $200 for Bibble and $100 for LightZone.

Have you used both? How would you compare them to, for example, Gimp as a tool for manipulating levels, enhancing contrast, etc.

K.

Keith_Beef
June 14th, 2010, 06:42 PM
I just read on Slashdot that F-Spot is being replaced as the default ubuntu image management application by something named "Shotwell"!

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/06/14/0055221/Ubuntu-Replaces-F-Spot-With-Shotwell

Over the weekend, I took some wildlife photos with a Canon G11 and uploaded those, along with about 900 other photos from the same camera, into F-Spot. And spent a few hours tagging them.

Altogether, I've been reasonably happy with F-Spot, and had not heard of Shotwell before.

Any idea of how to migrate an F-Spot catalog to Shotwell, conserving all the metadata?

K.

philinux
June 14th, 2010, 06:46 PM
Any idea of how to migrate an F-Spot catalog to Shotwell, conserving all the metadata?

K.

Not for a while.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1509341

nymusicman
June 17th, 2010, 11:57 PM
Digikam is not a viable option as it pulls in KDE. We are not going to be able to fit that on the CD. Regardless given it's KDE dependency it won't look or feel as being part of the default desktop nor will it act like one. Digikam is probably a fine application for Kubuntu but not for Ubuntu.



It won't matter, sanity shall prevail regardless of how hard the gimp/gthumb/anti-mono/kde fanboys spam any poll.



your logic is flawed, you assume you represent every user. You also ignore decades of study in usability when determining usable applications.


True, but then look at the votes. Over 60% prefer digikam, whether they are a gnome user or a KDE user. I understand you can't fit digikam on a CD, but then a company or programmer should get the bright idea of making a "copy-cat" (with feasible changes) for gnome instead of putting out something completely different that doesn't do half as much. I don't think the logic is flawed at all if you see the poll results.