F-Spot Photo Manager

F-Spot Overview

F-Spot, http://www.f-spot.org, helps manage your photos, including sharing, touch-up, finding and organizing your images.  F-Spot supports the ability to tag your photos making it easy to find and organize them, share them with popular photo sharing websites, including Picasa, Flickr, Gallery and more, and basic editing including sharpening your photos or rotating their size.

Importing

To start F-Spot, click the Applications menu on your panel, Graphics, and then F-Spot Photo Manager.  The first time you run F-Spot, you will be asked to import your photos in to F-Spot.  Click the drop down box, and select the folder in which your photos have been saved in.  You can choose to add an entire folder and directory, or click on the photo individually, or use shift and click to choose multiple photos at the same time.

Tagging

You can apply tags, also called labels, to your photos, to quickly sort and search through.  F-Spot comes with a number of default tags, including Events, People, Favorites and Places.  To create a new label, right click in the label menu on the left, and click create new tag.  Enter the name of your tag, and define a parent, such as Places.  For example, if you have viewed the screenshot above, I have tagged the photo's "Washington D.C." (where the photos were taken) and applied Places as the parent tag. 

To add the tag to a photo, right click on the photo (or photos) you want to tag,  highlight "Attach Tag", and click on the tag you would like to apply.

Editing

F-Spot gives you the ability to perform minor edits to your photos by clicking the "Edit Photo" button near the top of the program under the menu..  You can adjust the color of your photos, crop the picture, remove red-eye, straighten your photo, or add a description.  To learn more about editing your photos, visit the F-Spot User Guide. 

Browsing

Click the Browse button to view the photos thumbnails.  Alternatively, you can zoom in and out by clicking the View menu, and choose Zoom In or Out.  As you add photos to your collection, you can use the slider widget above the photos to view on a timeline.

You can also view by tag, clicking on the tag on the left hand menu will display all photos labeled with that particular tag.  

To learn more about all the different ways to view your photos, including full screen and slideshow, visit the F-Spot User Guide. 

Exporting 

F-spot gives you the ablity to export your photos to a number of popular photo sharing services, including Flickr, Gallery or Picasa.  You can also export to a CD or folder to backup your photos.  Choose the service you would like to export to, by clicking the File menu, Export and click on the service.  F-spot will need you to authorize your account the first time by clicking the Authorize button, which will open a web page for you to log in to.  Click on the files you would like to export, and click on the Export button.  To learn more, visit the F-Spot User Guide.