For the sake of precision

Posted May 7, 2009 21:09 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
In reply to: For the sake of precision by man_ls
Parent article: Tomboy, Gnote, and the limits of forks

> F-Spot imports pictures from cameras directly, and apparently
> it does not mount the camera as an USB disk; so it needs access
> to low level system calls.

I see that as more of a bug than a feature. Since I have never encountered a digital camera made since the VERY early days (i.e. one megapixel or less) that didn't store the images as files on a FAT/VFAT file system and exported that as a USB mass storage device, why would F-Spot spend so much effort reinventing a perfectly good wheel?

I see that sort of thing as needless bloat taking up space and harboring vast potential for bugs and security problems in little used and likely poorly audited code.

For the sake of precision

Posted May 7, 2009 22:31 UTC (Thu) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link]

Furtermore F-Spot completley screwed me up by applying different rules to the imported files. If I mount an SD card as a disk the files were named XXX.JPG. I copied these to local disk and then had F-spot import them and they remained named ".JPG". I then stuck another SD card in and F-spot apparently grabbed it (I was a bit mystified why the window looked completely different than the import window) but when F-spot imported the files directly it renamed them to XXX.jpg (lowercase). It then failed to find collisions and put both files on the disk.

I was relying on F-spot renaming the files to -1.JPG when there was a collision in order to get rid of duplicates (why they can't remove even the most obvious duplicates is another question!). I now had lots of .jpg files as well. Trying to clean up this mess and I deleted a lot of non-duplicate .jpg files.

They certainly should *not* be doing this at all. Mount the damn disk and maybe detect and offer to import using the same code as before! Even the user-friendly OS/X mounts the disk and the user has to eject it.

For the sake of precision

Posted May 8, 2009 4:31 UTC (Fri) by sitaram (guest, #5959) [Link]

I suspect that's not f-spot's fault/decision. The afore-mentioned gphoto2 command line app also does the same. It's a standard called PTP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_Transfer_Protocol

For the sake of precision

Posted May 8, 2009 16:56 UTC (Fri) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link] (2 responses)

There is a bunch of cameras that do NOT export mass storage. A bunch of dSLRs are in that category as well.

Also there is a big bonus of PTP - you can request the camera to get all thumbnails of all photos on the camera and get it in a few seconds. Then you can select which exactly photos do you want to download from the camera.

For the sake of precision

Posted May 8, 2009 17:09 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (1 responses)

Where's the benefit? By the time a human looks at the thumbnails and decides what they want, they likely could have uploaded everything, don't you think?

For the sake of precision

Posted May 8, 2009 18:29 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I don't know what type of camera you have, but my several Canon Ixus (an excellent series IMHO) take several minutes to download e.g. a thousand pictures. Some visual confirmation of what you are indeed downloading is nice, at least.