F-Spot is a management tool for your collection of digital images tailored for the GNOME desktop. It allows you to assign different tags to your images in order to categorize them and offers various neat image editing options. For example, you can remove red-eye, crop, and adjust brightness and colors. F-Spot supports sixteen common file types, including JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and RAW.

You can import photos from your hard drive, your digital camera, or your iPod. You can also use F-Spot to create photo CDs, generate a Website gallery, or export your photos to your Flickr, 23, Picasa Web, or SmugMug account.

To access F-Spot, click Computer+F-Spot Photo Browser. The first time you run F-Spot, you can declare a file folder with the images you want to import into your collection. If you already have a collection of images stored on your hard drive, enter the path to the respective directory and optionally include subfolders. F-Spot imports these images into its database.

Figure 15.1. F-Spot Main Window

F-Spot's main window is divided into three main areas. Categories, tags, and detailed information for the selected images are displayed in a sidebar on the left and thumbnails of all images bearing the selected tag or category or, if none is selected, the entire collection is displayed in the right part of the window.

By default, your photos are displayed in reverse-chronological order, so your latest photos are always at the top. You can sort your photos in chronological order or reverse-alphabetical order by clicking View+Reverse Order.

A menu bar at the top of the window allows you to access the main menus. A toolbar below the menu bar offers the following options:

Importing Photos

You can import photos from your hard drive or from your digital camera (see Section 15.2, “Downloading Pictures from Your Camera” for more information). F-Spot automatically makes copies of photos imported from your hard drive. If you do not want to copy images, uncheck Copy files to the Photos folder on the Import dialog box, or press Shift when dragging photos into F-Spot.

Figure 15.2. Importing Images into F-Spot

By default, F-Spot copies your photos to the /Photos directory in your home directory. You can change the directory F-Spot uses by clicking Edit+Preferences.

If all the photos you are importing are from a particular event, or if they have some other characteristic in common, you can create a tag for them so you can easily find them at a later time. During the import, select Attach Tag, then choose the appropriate tag from the drop-down menu.

To import photos:

1. Click File+Import.

2. Select an import source, then click Open.

3. After the photos are finished loading, click Import.

   The photos are added to your catalog.