F-Spot is an
image organizerAn image organizer or image management application is application software focused on organizing digital images. Image organizers represent one kind of desktop organizer software applications.- Common image organizers features :...
, designed to provide personal photo management for the
GNOMEGNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
desktop environment. The name is a play on the words F-Stop and
G-SpotThe Gräfenberg Spot, often called the G-Spot, is a bean-shaped area of the vagina. Many women report that it is an erogenous zone which, when stimulated, can lead to strong sexual arousal, powerful orgasms and female ejaculation...
.
F-Spot is an
image organizerAn image organizer or image management application is application software focused on organizing digital images. Image organizers represent one kind of desktop organizer software applications.- Common image organizers features :...
, designed to provide personal photo management for the
GNOMEGNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
desktop environment. The name is a play on the words F-Stop and
G-SpotThe Gräfenberg Spot, often called the G-Spot, is a bean-shaped area of the vagina. Many women report that it is an erogenous zone which, when stimulated, can lead to strong sexual arousal, powerful orgasms and female ejaculation...
.
Features
F-Spot aims to have an interface that is simple to use, yet still supports advanced features such as tagging images and displaying and exporting
ExifExchangeable image file format is a standard that specifies the formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras , scanners and other systems handling image and sound files recorded by digital cameras...
and
XMPThe Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform is a standard, created by Adobe Systems Inc., for processing and storing standardized and proprietary information relating to the contents of a file....
metadataThe term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
.
All major photographic
image formatsImage file formats are standardized means of organizing and storing digital images. Image files are composed of either pixels, vector data, or a combination of the two. Whatever the format, the files are rasterized to pixels when displayed on most graphic displays...
are supported, including
JPEGIn computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
, PNG,
TIFFTIFF is a file format for storing images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and both amateur and professional photographers in general. As of 2009, it is under the control of Adobe Systems...
,
DNGDigital Negative is an open raw image format owned by Adobe used for digital photography. It was launched on September 27, 2004. The launch was accompanied by the first version of the DNG specification, plus various products including a free of charge DNG Converter utility...
and several vendor-specific
RAWA camera raw image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of either a digital camera, image scanner, or motion picture film scanner. Raw files are so named because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be printed or edited with a bitmap graphics editor...
formats (CR2, PEF, ORF, SRF, CRW, MRW and RAF). Other supported file types are GIF,
SVGScalable Vector Graphics is a family of specifications of an XML-based file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and dynamic . The SVG specification is an open standard that has been under development by the World Wide Web Consortium since 1999.SVG images and their...
and PPM. As of 2008, the RAW formats were not editable with F-Spot. However, newer releases of F-Spot have the DevelopInUFRaw extension, which calls on
UFRawUFRaw is an application which can read and manipulate photographs in raw image formats, as created by many digital cameras. UFRaw is available both as a stand-alone utility, as a GIMP and CinePaint plugin, and in F-Spot via the DevelopInUFRaw extension...
for the conversion work, and then re-imports the resulting
JPEGIn computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
back into F-Spot as a new version of the original RAW.
Photos can be imported directly from the
cameraA camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...
. The driver support is provided by
libgphoto2gPhoto is a set of software applications and libraries for use in digital photography. gPhoto supports not just retrieving of images from camera devices, but also upload and remote controlled configuration and capture, depending on whether the camera supports those features.Released under the GNU...
. The GNOME desktop environment can also optionally detect if a camera or a memory card has been attached, and import images to F-Spot automatically.
Basic functions such as crop and rotate available alongside more advanced features such as red-eye removal and versioning. The rotate function allows for movements in single degree increments with autocrop, not just the clunky quarter turn landscape to portrait adjustment. Color adjustments are supported with a histogram. They include an auto- improve and individual brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, and temperature.
Photo CDPhoto CD is a system designed by Kodak for digitizing and saving photos in a CD. Launched in 1992, the discs were designed to hold nearly 100 high quality images, scanned prints and slides using special proprietary encoding. Photo CDs are defined in the Beige Book and conform to the CD-ROM XA and...
s can be created by selecting multiple photographs and selecting "Export to CD" from the main menu.
Photos in the F-Spot library can be uploaded to a number of online photo storage sites. F-Spot supports two major gallery sites,
FlickrFlickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
and
Picasa Web AlbumPicasa is an image organizer and image viewer for organizing and editing digital photos, plus an integrated photo-sharing website, originally created by Idealab in 2002 and owned by Google since 2004. "Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my...
, and also using stand-alone web gallery software, including
GalleryGallery is an open source project enabling management and publication of digital photographs and other media through a PHP-enabled web server. Photo manipulation includes automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, and flipping, among other things...
and O.r.i.g.i.n.a.l. F-Spot can also generate static web gallery sites and export to
FacebookFacebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
. F-Spot automatically downsizes photos before exporting to Flickr, and though the F-Spot web site describes this as "optional," there is no option to not downsize photos before export.
Technical information
F-Spot is written in the C# programming language using
MonoMono, pronounced , is a free and open source project led by Xamarin to create an Ecma standard compliant .NET-compatible set of tools including, among others, a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime....
.
When images are imported into F-Spot, they are written to disk. The folder is
/username/Pictures/Photos/[year]/[month]/[Day]. This appears to be undocumented. When the images have been modified in F-spot, the program Commonist can be pointed to this folder and the images uploaded to Wikimedia:Commons in the normal way.
The F-Spot project was started by
Ettore PerazzoliEttore Perazzoli was an Italian free software developer.-Biography:Born in Milan, Italy, he studied Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano university. He wrote a port of x64, a Commodore 64 emulator for Unix, to DOS, thus turning it into a cross-platform emulator, which was renamed to VICE...
and is now maintained by Ruben Vermeersch.
F-Spot is the standard image tool for several GNOME based
distributionsA Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...
. However
FedoraFedora is a RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat...
replaced F-Spot with
ShotwellShotwell is an image organizer designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. It has replaced F-Spot as the standard image tool for several GNOME-based Linux distributions, including Fedora in version 13 and Ubuntu in its 10.10 Maverick Meerkat...
in Fedora 13.
UbuntuUbuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
has done the same as of 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. It still remains the default in
openSUSEopenSUSE is a general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported openSUSE Project and sponsored by SUSE...
.
See also
- Shotwell
Shotwell is an image organizer designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. It has replaced F-Spot as the standard image tool for several GNOME-based Linux distributions, including Fedora in version 13 and Ubuntu in its 10.10 Maverick Meerkat...
– digital photo manager for GNOMEGNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
- digiKam
digiKam is an image organizer and editor using KDE Platform. It runs on most known desktop environments and window managers if the required libraries are installed. It supports all major image file formats, and can organize collections of photographs in directory-based albums, or dynamic albums by...
– digital photo manager by KDEKDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...
- Comparison of image viewers
This article presents a comparison of image viewers and image organizers which can be used for image viewing.-General information:Note 1: Adobe Bridge comes included in the price with the Adobe Creative Suite CS2, Adobe Production Studio and Photoshop Elements 4 for Mac OS X...
External links