I don’t like F-Spot. I’d rather have something that works fast, provides the ability to tag photos, upload them to PicasaWeb without any problems and… not using Mono. So far I was not able to find any alternative. Shotwell looks promising but it lacks both picasaweb upload and photo tagging. Yes, it is faster though but some common features (like “Open with Gimp”) are missing at the moment. It is written in Vala, btw.

Correction: F-Spot embeds the tags as EXIF tag called Keywords, if you have set the option to store metadata to image files. It stores only leaf tags (i.e. not categories). And thus the method described is OK to add tags that were not stored inside the image. We might need a service that will update Image metadata based on Tracker keywords.

AND F-Spot broke MakerNotes in all my images, great. Now I hate it even more.

So far F-Spot tags were available only to F-Spot despite the fact that they are stored in sqlite database. I decided to fetch these tags from F-Spot db and put it into Tracker one, since I started using it more and more (and in 0.7 it will be even better!). Here’s what I got:

Please note that Tracker does not do hierarchical tags so you will get a flat list of tags. E.g. if you have “People/Family/John Smith” tag level, the image will be tagged wth “People”, “Family” and “John Smith” tags. It is possible to emulate nested tags by setting some separator but I don’t feel that is the right way. The reverse mapping is possible. I think I will need to write that soon :).

So, grab the script from http://www.rtg.in.ua/download/fspot-tracker-tag-convert.py and convert your tags. Now we need more Tracker-aware apps :)