Earlier this week, Eye of GNOME dev Frederico Mena Quintero blogged about EOG and image management. I think EOG is great and all, but the best part of the post was that he reminded me of the now-defunct CompuPic, a pro-level (sort of) photo management app that for a brief period of time a few years ago was available for Linux.

It’s gone now, of course. But it was fun while it lasted. Ironically, the worst part was parenthetically attached to the same paragraph, in which he matter-of-factly said that these days everyone agrees that F-Spot is the bee’s knees of image management. Well, that’s just not true.

F-Spot is barely more useful than the back of a sticky note when it comes to managing your images. Image management for grown-ups is about the image metadata, and the only metadata that F-Spot thinks about are tags. Yikes.

Tags are a Web2.0 fad (hopefully soon to die in obscurity!) that have the unique distinction of growing less and less useful the more you use them. They don’t scale, they have zero context, and they’re all nonhierarchically equivalent.

Could you manage your digital music collection solely by creation date and tags? Not hardly.

I’ve worked as a photographer in two different contexts: in-house and freelance. Pros manage their photos with metadata-aware, smart tools like Extensis Portfolio and ACDSee. If you think that home users don’t have the same needs as pros, look forward one year. A year from now you’ll have twice as many images to keep track of as you have today. Pros’ problems are the same as home users’ problems, just a few years (or even months) ahead.

The frustrating thing is that there aren’t any Linux apps that intelligently manage photos. For a while there was imgSeek, but development of it seems to have stopped. What I’d really like to know is how hard-core Blender users do their digital asset management — it’s much the same as photos; different metadata in part of course. What do the troopers behind Elephant’s Dream and Peach use to keep track of the countless 3-D blends?

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Laugh factory of the weekend: Miguel de Icaza complaining about Apple’s vendor lock-in and anti-freedom behavior — http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-15.html

For a more detailed explanation of why this is hilarious, read either an analysis of the situation or brush up on some recent background information.

[ed. note: this doesn't mean that De Icaza's observations are incorrect, only that they are funny]

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A story of mine at linux.com entitled “Three MythTV Linux distros compared” is receiving lots of hits this afternoon via Digg.  It’s a head-to-head comparison of MythBuntu, KnoppMyth, and MythDora.  All three are Linux distros designed to install and serve as a dedicated MythTV DVR system.

Yet in the real article, the Digg discussion, and via this blog’s comment form, a number of people are independently saying that I should have included LinuxMCE among the contestants.  Several of them are assuming that LinuxMCE’s absence means that I’ve never heard of it, which is of course untrue and an altogether different set of misunderstandings.

But the truth is that I didn’t include LinuxMCE in the comparison because it’s not the same kind of product, and therefore it’s simply not relevant to the MythTV distro roundup. It includes a bunch of other packages for disparate activities like Asterisk phone service and “home automation.” Those tasks have nothing to do with running a DVR — which, as I stated in the intro paragraph, was the point.

Lumping it in with the MythTV distros would be comparing apples to oranges, which is both unfair to people with either preference and pretty much entirely pointless.

And I don’t mean “unfair” as in “LinuxMCE would obviously come out on top, because it does so much more.” Frankly I think LinuxMCE would have fared quite poorly at the task, since I don’t want to run Asterisk or home automation from my set-top box, and doing so would degrade system performance.  You can install any vanilla Linux distro these days and include MythTV, Asterisk, a bunch of X10 utilities, and metric boatloads of other server stuff, too.  That system would take LinuxMCE to school on the feature front.

But so what? If you want a dedicated MythTV system, there are people catering to that exact need: MythBuntu, KnoppMyth, and MythDora.  More power to you if you have different requirements and LinuxMCE suits your needs.  But it is distinctive enough that when it gets stable, it should be reviewed on its own merits, not as part of a roundup of like tools.

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Our first winner: Siglar, which describes itself as an “acronym creation” application. Essentially, you input a series of words, and it generates an acronym from them. It’s insane. But I love it.

Although I suspect that most free software apps would benefit from something that does the reverse: you pick out a cool acronym, then bend words around to try and retro-fit a name to it. It sure worked for MASK GI JOE.

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Here are some links to articles about professional graphics and photography on Linux. If you find a topic that I haven’t written about, please let me know.

• Photography
  • RAW image support under Linux (includes raw converter UFRaw)
    • review of raw converter RawTherapee (v 1.1)
    • review of raw converter RawStudio (v 0.5.1)
    • review of raw converter LightZone (v 2.1)
  • working with High-dynamic range image formats
  • Linux photo managers side-by-side
  • wrangling large photo collections with ImgSeek
  • correcting perspective and lens distortion with Hugin
• Hardware
  • monitor calibration
  • using Wacom pressure-sensitive graphics tablets
  • profiling scanners with Lprof
• Software:
  • Raster editors: The GIMP and Krita side-by-side
  • Panoramic image creation
  • running Photoshop plugins in the GIMP, on Linux
  • image repair with GREYCstoration
  • texture synthesis with Resynthesizer
  • ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick side-by-side
  • optical character recognition
• Desktop publishing
  • Color management
  • Pantone and Linux
  • the lowdown on fonts

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