F-Spot's Import Rolls

I discovered F-Spot quite a while back and it immediately became my replacement for Adobe Photo Album: one of the last Windows applications to go in my complete move to the Linux desktop.

F-Spot continues to develop and improve with each release, and one of my favourites has to the the Import Roll feature.

I tend to import photos into F-Spot in a bit of a rush when I really don't have time to properly vet, delete, edit and tag them. I get around to doing that later.

The basic idea is that every time you import any photos, the application remembers when this happened. Photos with the same import time are grouped into the same import roll. You can easily filter on import roll either by selecting a specific one, choosing all after a given roll or all between two that you select.

Import rolls make it easy to come back to these photos later as a cohesive set without worrying about which photos mark the start and end of the import. The problem would be even worse if the dates of the photos imported overlap the photos you already have: properly distinguishing them would be very tricky indeed. Import rolls make it easy.

The only thing I would like to see added is the ability to add a short name or description to the roll. That would allow me to note things like "From Mum's camera" or "after holiday" etc. I could also shove some character in at the start of the name to tell me that I need to go through them, and remove it later when done. That would make it even better...