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How light-duty? F-Spot is more like Lightroom than a simpler Photoshop.

What's the difference between a photo editor and an image editor?

Image editor is an application designed for manipulation of 2D bitmap raster image data, usually using a set of very complex, powerful and effective functions such as drawing tools, filters, layering and channel operations.

Photo editor is a piece of shit sold to gullible customers, "allowing" them to "manage" and "archive" all of their "digital photos" and sometimes even perform a limited set of "operations" on them, making the whole process "fun".

So, the only real difference is the feature set, the primary activities you do with the programs, and the feature set. Hope this clear things up. =)

Have you tried F-Spot?

Ufraw has for a long time included a batch tool called ufraw-batch. Try running that command it if you have ufraw installed and see for yourself.

This functionality is also available in a pretty nice GUI fashion via an f-spot extension. Works very well for me.

And Gnome Do, Banshee, F-Spot and other more complex stuff than Tomboy?

I don't get what's so complex about Gnome-Do. In fact, it looks like an app that should have been imlemented in Python (to make it easy to write plugins)

How easy would they be to port (feature complete) to C or C++?

C is a stupid strawman here. Nobody is porting anything to C.

Everyone on either side gets everything they need, and I get a nice and productive language to work with that has extremely useful features (garbage collection/memory management, good event hooks, delegate methods, easy extensibility, etc).

Obviously, C# does all of this worse and Python, though it has a faster vm.

I find it funny how kids these days think C# brings something new to table. They don't have what it takes to do it in C++, but require the safety wheels of static typing in order to keep their spaghetti manageable.

And Gnome Do, Banshee, F-Spot and other more complex stuff than Tomboy? How easy would they be to port (feature complete) to C or C++?

I'm doing some work at the moment on a personal project. The back-end is core C# only, and eventually I'll add in Mono.Addins, which can be redistributed and used on MS's .Net and are part of Mono. There's a System.Windows.Forms front-end made through Visual Studio (because it's the only way to get a decent GUI editor for it). There's a GTK# front-end made through MonoDevelop (because S.W.F on Linux is ugly). Everyone on either side gets everything they need, and I get a nice and productive language to work with that has extremely useful features (garbage collection/memory management, good event hooks, delegate methods, easy extensibility, etc).

Yeah, but doesn't F-Spot do the same thing? It not only supports PicasaWeb, but it also supports flickr and SmugMug. Yeah, I know Picasa runs on Linux, but F-Spot loads faster, has more features and has the advantage of being offered under the GPL.

F-Spot will export to Picasaweb, Flickr and others. Also there is an addon for Firefox called Firefox Universal Uploader that will do the same function for many sites.

It's not a dedicated uploader, but I've been using F-Spot http://f-spot.org/Features/ to upload to Picasa, and it works very well for me.

... A single app in 2007. and we're just talking about image browsing.. not something fancy ...

By no means is there a single application that excels for image browsing. Personally, I prefer Gwenview, and don't see how it "sucks completely" at all, but c'est la vie, I suppose. Anyway, there are plenty more that work perfectly well:

DigiKam, F-Spot, et cetera.

... My professors sometimes send out home-work and papers in word or visio ...

I'm a student at USC, and I get homework, papers, and other things that are .doc, .vis, .ppt, et cetera. I also have to send assignments as email attachments, and so I have to make sure that they are compatible. I have never once had a problem switching between MS Office and OpenOffice.org. I do keep a small partition on one of my computers with Windows XP installed, just in case problems ever do crop up, but that isn't a fault of Linux or FLOSS. As you said, the lock-in is purely Microsoft's doing.

... when rendering small fonts it just seems blurry. not as sharp and pretty as in windows ...

That is completely subjective. I don't notice much of a difference between modern fonts in Linux versus Windows TrueType. To each his own.

... Not to mention the horrifying ordeal i had to go through just to set-up my legacy atheros card ...

I can't relate to your wifi issues either. I had a bit of trepidation concerning wireless when I installed Kubuntu 6.10 on my new laptop, just because of all of the horror stories that I've heard about wireless support in Linux. I was pleasantly surprised, though. Kubuntu automagically detected my internal wireless, and the only thing required of me was to type in the WEP key. Wireless support is getting very close to being ubiquitous in most distros now.

I realize that you aren't a troll, and neither am I flaming Vista. On the contrary, I believe that Microsoft has finally done some things right with this version of Windows. UAC, no matter what the Slashbots may think, is a step in the right direction. "Protected Mode" for IE7 is another Good Thing (TM).

Nonetheless, I still believe that the bad outweighs the good. Vista's DRM implementation, WGA and license restrictions, overpricing (in my opinion), the company's continued attempts at lock-in, proprietary code, disdain for open standards, and a host of other reasons keep me away from Windows.

By the way, maybe you should test drive more "user-friendly" distros. Gentoo is great, and Portage rocks - only second to the original FreeBSD Ports system (again, in my opinion), but it doesn't have the "just works" mentality that K/X/Ubuntu, Fedora Core, Mandriva, and yes, even SuSE (for now) possess. That just isn't its MO.

What it all boils down to is the nature of FLOSS, which is evolution - getting better and better over time. We've been witnessing it in Linux for the past fourteen years, and I am nothing but optimistic about the future.

F-Spot http://f-spot.org/Main_Page, and tomboy http://www.beatniksoftware.com/tomboy/

Read Seth Nickell's thoughts on the issue, particuliarly the section entitled "The Horror Story". It's happening.

It's bad enough that Tomboy is in GNOME and F-Spot (Novell again) is so damned nice. Users are already demanding these applications, because the alternatives suck. Developers love C# 'cause it's so nice to build with. The first few hits are free.

The whole Mono patent issue really strikes me as a Novell play for market share - they work a deal with Microsoft, write gorgeous apps in C# that everyone wants, encourage competing distros to integrate those apps, then laugh as Microsoft takes out their competition in court. Or something. IANAL, obviously. Hopefully I'm just being paranoid.

Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but;

http://f-spot.org/

A really fast picture-collection browser. It sorts everything on date by the meta-data that your digital camera put in the files. You can add 'catagories' and the like yourself. Generate albums and such.

Check out digikam or F-Spot. Both support access to EXIF data, both are free (GPL). Digikam is KDE oriented, and F-Spot is GNOME oriented. Both feature basic photo editing, while F-Spot's tagging and organizing may be a bit stronger. Both support a wide range of memory cards and cameras.

In this fashion it is absolutely no different than if the app linked to GTK or QT to release a "native" version. It is native. It is compiled for and runs under Linux without any API emulators or ABI interfaces required. That is the definition of a native application.

That's *your* definition of "native". By that definition, for example, OpenOffice using X11 on Mac OS X is "native", even though no Mac user would agree.

As someone who has worked with WineLib, I can tell you this is no easy task. They have obviously spent a good deal of time on this.

There are plenty of tasks that are not easy, and require a good deal of time, but that's independent of the final product. If we judged products based on how much time is spent on them, then Vista and Duke Nukem Forever are shaping up to be the best programs ever written.

Then people like you go and rant on them some more? And you wonder why hardly any companies even go to the trouble of releasing Linux versions of software.

Indeed. We hold proprietary apps to the same standards as open-source apps. If they look bad compared to those, we tell them. Do you want us to be easy on them *despite* not even releasing source code?

And you know, we don't really care. We seem to be doing pretty good without them. Another photo management app? Yawn. If that's what we're missing, I say good riddance.

How does Picasa compare to F-Spot?

How does picasa fare against f-spot or digikam?

No, it is not free nor nativ. So why not go with f-spot insted?

Actually, I found f-spot very, very nice. It rivals picassa in some areas and really fills in the gap on the linux side. I'm glad picassa is out, but I'll probably stick with f-spot.

http://f-spot.org/Main_Page

Don't forget about F-Spot for us GNOME users.

I'm such a moron... I can't believe I entirely forgot about a great piece of Linux photo management software - F-Spot! Larry Ewing (of Tux fame) has been working on it for some time for Novell.

It looks to be an iPhoto work-alike for Linux.

Several options...

As already pointed out, ImageMagick and some scripting will keep you going forever..however if you're not into that there are some graphical tools:

http://gthumb.sourceforge.net/
http://f-spot.org/Main_Page

Also, check out this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_image_v iewers