[Solang-users] Initial feedback

[Marc Menem]

Hi all,

After reading the impressive initial reviews about Solang, I thought I
should give it a try. I am currently managing most of my pictures with
f-spot on a Netbook, and I have approximately 13000 pictures,  f-spot is
having a bad time with such a collection !

I built Solang from Git, and after figuring out the dependencies,
installation was quite straightforward on Ubuntu 9.10

I imported 880 photos to get a feeling of the application. And so far
Solang has kept its promises; browsing through my collection is
extremely fast.

So I would like to congratulate the developers for their amazing work,
and I will be following the project closely !

Here are some comments/ideas/bugs:


- The import was nice and fast enough, I found the import dialog quite
functional; the progress window is a bit terse, it just displays a
count, and it would be nice to have a thumbnail of the currently
imported photo, a file name etc...

- f-spot stores the tags in the Exif tags which is quite nice since I
can reimport the photos in a different software and keep my tags -
Solang does not seem to support this;

- I did not find any way to set the preferences (the folder where my
photos are stored - this is necessary if I import pics from my camera as
I would like to store them on my USB drive - there isn't enough space on
my netbook)

- The thumbnails are stored in .local/share/solang. Why doesn't Solang
use the same .thumbnails/ as nautilus and f-spot ? I think it makes a
lot of sense to have all the apps sharing the thumbnails as this reduces
the space needed.

- Solang is missing thumbnails for every non JPG pic in my collection.
But if I open the image I can actually see it.

- Solang does not seem to support the Exif orientation tag, so all my
portrait pictures has thumbnails with the wrong orientation.

- I can't see the name/folder of the files in Solang this would be nice
to have in the properties tab.

- The minimum height of the window is 600 pixels which is a bit too much
on a Netbook with a 1024x600 resolution, can it be set a bit smaller ?

- Some file management features would be nice to have - ie: I looked for
a delete function, but it seems there is no way to delete a photo from
the collection right now. 

- It would be nice to be able to add tag to pictures by right clicking
them (just like in f-spot). The filtering only allows to include a tag,
it would be nice to be able to exclude it as well as have some set
operations (and/or).

- The editor does not work (screen is gray) so I was not able to try it.

- Solang crashes if pictures are deleted on disk.



marc