Missives from the 6th Floor

Turns out f-spot's RAW support isn't completely polished. In particular, I discovered that the flickr export extension doesn't realize that it can't upload RAW files to flickr, so uploads just get refused by flickr. To add insult to injury, the f-spot export/convert extensions don't seem to work on RAW files either - so I couldn't just select the photos I wanted to upload, export them to JPG, and then point a flickr uploader at them.

So I tried the version of digiKam that Fedora 9 includes, and found it lacking in most of the same ways. The real deal-breaker with digiKam is it's one-to-one relationship between directories and "albums" - I really like the f-spot time-line view, and since I've been using f-spot to manage photos, they're all in it's YYYY/MM/DD directory structure, which makes finding photos from a multi-day event difficult in digiKam.

I tried both RawStudio and UFRaw briefly, and couldn't figure out why both of them made my photo's look washed out and horrible. They look "right" in both f-spot and digiKam, but I suspect both of those apps are doing some auto-settings/correction that RawStudio and UFRaw aren't.

I guess next up are a couple commercial apps - like LightZone and Bibble.