wahlau's online hut

while trying to make full use of the last day of my holidays, i thought perhaps it's not a bad idea to organize my photos a little, before it gets bigger and messier, thanks to digital camera ;)

since i am at it, i went ahead and played with f-spot, a personal photo organizer software available under ubuntu, actually many linux distribution i assume. It did not take too long until i figure how i should import my photos, and try to upload them to Picasaweb. All looked easy until i entered my picasaweb account information - poof. It crashed.

Intuitively i thought it would have been wrong login information, since i wasn't sure about using gmail account or my usual login name... it turned out that it is not a problem on the login at all. It is a problem that exists in the default Ubuntu Edgy version, where F-spot crashes when it tries to access picasaweb. Someone said it is Google's issue, since this problem exists only after Google made some changes to picasaweb's API. 

In the forum thread i found the solution. Brett Presnell of University of Florida is kind to provide a .deb file that he can compiled from the CVS, which has the problem solved. Installation worked right away, and i've been able to upload photos using f-spot to picasaweb! yippie :)

If you wonder where you can modify any configuration in f-spot manually, don't search for the folder .f-spot or similar under $home. At the initial point of the problem, i actually went around to search for it, and found nothing. Later only i realized that the configurations are under .gconf/apps/f-spot. The entered login information for picasaweb, perhaps flickr too (i have yet to try) are not manually readable, but you can remove it or modify the password in your Keyring Manager (System -> Administration -> Keyring Manager). 

Back to f-spot. The tagging feature is what i would like to now try and play around. I can also use it for photo viewing and import. If it continue to work well, i might just use it as my default photo album/organizer... Aleska mentioned in his blog about how you can change the default Photo folder to another desired path by making a symbolic link to $home/Photos. This is a nice work about, since i do that for my data that i share between windows and linux. If you don't do that, make sure you have enough space in your $home. :)

time to go back to my photo organizing work. :)