Thread: Organize images with F-Spot

F-Spot is a great program for keeping track of a large number of images. F-Spot offers advanced tracking features with the use of tags and categories. To start off, import photos 'into F-Spot from a location on your hard disk. Normally, F-Spot will be in the Graphics submenu in the main menu.

Click on import, select the folder in which the photos are stored. Ifthere are a number of sub folders, make sure that Include Subfolders is checked. Also uncheck Copy files to the Photos folder. The Photos folder is the internal folder used by F-Spot for storing images. Checking this will create a copy of all your images, and
take longer to import into F-Spot.

You can tag the photos when you are importing them. To properly organise the photos, make sure there is a date tag, a year tag, a tag for the occasion, and a description. Separate tags with commas, Additionally, tag individual images with the colour temperature, the orientation, the camera with which it was taken and any other descriptive tags that are relevant.

The next step is to tag and rate the photos. You can perform either of these operations on a number of photos at once. If the tag sidebar does not appear by default, go to View> Componants > Sidebar or just use the F9 key. If the sidebar still does not appear (this happens sometimes), select the right edge of the window and drag it towards the centre of the window.



The sidebar should now appear. To start with, create a new tag called 'custom'. Right-elick in the tags side bar, and select 'create new tag'. Here, although the tag is created, it does not have an icon. You can assign an icon, by right-elicking on the custom tag, and selecting the blank icon, and choosing a new icon from the list. You can add custom icons by importing PNG files.

You can create new tags. Right-click on the tag menu and select a new tag. Enter the text and choose 'custom' as the parent tag.

You can have as many parent tags as you want, and child and sibling tags. The hierarchy of the tags can be complex. but a good way is to have a few tags in the first level, and increasing them in subsequent levels. Note that if you do not add icons to the tags, the first image you tag with a particular tag becomes the icon for that tag. You can select a bunch of photos, right-click on them and then tag them with a tag of your choice. You can also rate pictures on a scale of one to five. To browse by tags, double-click the tag and all tagged photos will line up. The more tags you click in succession, the smaller the results get.

F-Spot can also let you analyse the metadata for individual photos. This is not restricted to just the EXIF data stored with the image. but the directory structure and the extended EXIF information as well. To access the metadata viewer. click on the tags menu and select metadata.