F-Spot is a slowly maintained

image organizer An image organizer or image management application is application software focused on organising digital images. Image organizers represent one kind of desktop organizer software applications. Image organizer software is primarily focused on imp ...

, designed to provide personal photo management for the

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

desktop environment. The name is a play on the word

F-Stop In optics, the f-number of an optical system such as a camera lens is the ratio of the system's focal length to the diameter of the entrance pupil ("clear aperture").Smith, Warren ''Modern Optical Engineering'', 4th Ed., 2007 McGraw-Hill ...

History

The F-Spot project was started by

Ettore Perazzoli Ettore Perazzoli (June 15, 1974 - December 10, 2003) 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 ...

and is maintained by Stephen Shaw. F-Spot is written in the C# programming language using

Mono Mono may refer to: Common meanings * Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease" * Monaural, monophonic sound reproduction, often shortened to mono * Mono-, a numerical prefix representing anything single Music Performers * Mono (Japanese b ...

. Before its shutdown and discontinuation in 2017, F-Spot was the standard image tool for several GNOME based distributions. Even before that,

Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both sides ...

replaced F-Spot with Shotwell in Fedora 13.

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: ''Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All the ...

has done the same as of 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. There is some new work to update f-spot and potentially bring it to Windows and Mac.

Features

F-Spot aimed to have an interface that is simple to use but also facilitate advanced features such as tagging images, and displaying and exporting image

metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

Exif Exchangeable image file format (officially Exif, according to JEIDA/JEITA/CIPA specifications) is a standard that specifies formats for images, sound, and ancillary tags used by digital cameras (including smartphones), scanners and other system ...

and XMP formats. All major photographic image formats are supported, including

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

, PNG,

TIFF Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processin ...

, DNG,

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

, SVG and PPM, as well as several vendor-specific

RAW Raw is an adjective usually describing: * Raw materials, basic materials from which products are manufactured or made * Raw food, uncooked food Raw or RAW may also refer to: Computing and electronics * .RAW, a proprietary mass spectrometry dat ...

formats (CR2, PEF, ORF, SRF, CRW, MRW and RAF). 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

UFRaw UFRaw (originally named after its founder Udi Fuchs's Raw, the backronym Unidentified Flying Raw replaced it as the full name) is an application which can read and manipulate photographs in raw image formats, as created by many digital cameras. ...

for the conversion work, and then re-imports the resulting

back into F-Spot as a new version of the original RAW. Photos can be imported directly from the

camera A camera is an Optics, optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), ...

. The driver support is provided by libgphoto2. 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.

Photo CD Photo CD is a system designed by Kodak for digitizing and saving photos onto a CD. Launched in 1991, the discs were designed to hold nearly 100 high quality images, scanned prints and slides using special proprietary encoding. Photo CDs are de ...

s can be created by selecting multiple photographs and selecting "Export to CD" from the main menu. 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 90-degree adjustment. Color adjustments are supported with a histogram. They include an auto-improve and individual brightness, contrast, hue, saturation and temperature. Photos in the F-Spot library can be uploaded to a number of online photo storage sites. F-Spot supports two major gallery sites,

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and professional ...

and

Picasa Web Albums Picasa Web Albums (PWA) was an image hosting and sharing web service from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites. The service links with Google's photo organizing desktop program Picasa. It was discontinued in May 2016 and succeeded by ...

, and also using stand-alone web gallery software, including

Gallery Gallery or The Gallery may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Art gallery ** Contemporary art gallery Music * Gallery (band), an American soft rock band of the 1970s Albums * ''Gallery'' (Elaiza album), 2014 album * ''Gallery'' (Gr ...

and O.r.i.g.i.n.a.l.Original Photo Gallery
/ref> F-Spot can also generate static web gallery sites and export to

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

. F-Spot automatically downsizes photos before exporting to Flickr, and though it describes this as "optional," there is no option to not downsize photos before export.

Technical information

When images are imported into F-Spot, they are written to disk. The folder is

/username/Pictures/Photos/ear 








An ear is the organ that enables hearing and, in mammals,  body balance using the vestibular system. In mammals, the ear is usually described as having three parts—the outer ear, the middle ear and the inner ear. The outer ear consists of ...
 onth ay/code>.

 See also


*  Shotwell – digital photo manager for GNOME 





A gnome  is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by  Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

*  digiKam – digital photo manager by KDE 




KDE is an international Free software movement, free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-know ...

* Comparison of image viewers 

This article presents a comparison of image viewers and image organizers which can be used for image viewing.
 Functionality overview and licensing

  Supported file formats 
 Commonly used vendor-independent formats

 Camera raw formats

 Support ...


 References



 External links


{{GNOME

 Discontinued software
 Free image organizers
 Linux image viewers
 Free image viewers
 Free photo software
 Software that uses Mono (software)
 Free software programmed in C Sharp
 Applications using D-Bus
 Graphics software that uses GTK
 GNOME Applications
 2010 software