Otherwise, I agree with the needs presented in the post, but note that one person’s workflow is not another’s. On the Mac I choose to keep original raw files, work on 16-bit PSD and save final JPEG in archive, flickr (1600×1200) and website-sized (800×600) files; more to the point, I have 160Gb of stuff, all of which lives on a backed-up RAID volume with my own directory-structure, and only the most recent work-in-progress lives on either the mac or linux boxes. And I like it this way; nothing that relies on a central library (like iPhoto/iTunes) is ever going to do it for me.
On linux, where an increasing amount of my photo-processing happens, I can *just* cope with gimp as long as I do something to smooth the histogram (wide-radius USM, orton, whatever) at the end but I would rather be using 16-bit TIFFs there. The workflow is mostly shell-scripted; I have functions for doing bulk RAW conversion with dcraw, for invoking gimp across files in turn, for renaming them, for restoring EXIF info, for geotagging, and for outputting in the various required sizes.

Much as we need visual tools for editing, and like them for image-selection, we need something that has a “push to archive” function so it only shows the stuff actually being edited.

Hope that’s clearer and thanks for the input / p;

Namely gamma control, for which I was using FastStone and which doesn’t run well in Wine. ”

Not sure what you mean here, GIMP does not allow for for altering the gamma in the image itself the way MTPaint does for example. (The screen layer is what I use to brighten portions of an image) The gamma of the main GIMP display window can be adjusted by means of the gamma option under the display filters. xgamma also can adjust gamma on a display as GAPA does which runs well in WINE according to my experience.

Considering 64bit Linux runs more efficiently than a 64bit machine running its default install of 32bit Vista (!?!?!) – I know I’m making the right move (with tile cache boosted, GIMP runs terrific in Linux, for which it ws designed, obviously) . . . and look forward to any and all comments you make here.

I despise Fstop and need a thumbnail viewer that resembles “FastStone” in its ability to dimension crop, enhance, saturate and fix gamma contrast quickly – but if I have to I’ll use GIMP for all of it. I routinely use GreyCStoration and Unsharp Mask 2012 to finish up images, so it may just be a “GIMP for all” workflow change and I’ll get used to it.

Cheers and best regards to you! / Paul

Simply put, whenever you edit an image F-Spot copies the image first, and lets you work on a copy. That way, you don’t touch the original.

My wife likes to crop, and do simple edits to the images, having F-Spot automatically keep the originals is great.

I don’t use F-Spot now because it starts slowing down when your collection gets very big.

I especially don’t like the way that F-Spot changes the EXIF timestamp. It’s trying to account for timezone differences, but it’s doing it the wrong way, without informing the user, and without the option to disable.

I compared Gimp, Firefox, Geeqie and digikam. The first three shows images identically, but digikam view has a blue shift.

I am giving F-Spot a shot after a while, and apparently it now manages RAW files like regular photos in its database. Luckily, I looked at the extensions list before importing anything, so I did not immediately freak out.

If you, like me, shoot only RAW, then no problem, DevelopInUFRaw allows you to do what the name suggests, and then the JPEG is associated with the RAW file as a version of the same photo. Batch operation is also supported and looks very promising, but I still need to figure out exactly how it works.

Additionally, if you, like I did on my trip abroad for sending pictures quickly, shoot both RAW and JPEG, then you need to run the function of RawPlusJpeg once after every such import roll, so to make the JPEGs versions of the RAWs.

Thanks for keeping the blog up!
Amir

Another hint: For RAW converting, if you mention Lightzone, there is Bibble, too. Quite Powerful, with a few managing features in the pro version, batch queues (which can be filled by digikam or f-spot plugins), etc, too.