Books on blurb.com
F-Spot and Bibble 4 Workflow
Published 2009-09-21The following description of my photography workflow regarding F-Spot and Bibble applies to Bibble 4. Lately, Bibble Labs released a preview of Bibble 5, which is great, but does not have any possibility to interact with F-Spot yet. As I have a Nikon D90, which is not supported by Bibble 4, for me this workflow is obsolete.
I created two very simple Extensions for F-Spot to make the life working with F-Spot as photo management tool and Bibble as RAW processing software easier.
- Send selected files from F-Spot to a Bibble work queue
- Import processed files back to F-Spot (this could be useful using other software to process raw files, too)
How to install:
- Open F-Spot, go to [Edit] -> [Manage Extensions]
- Go to [Repositories], then [Add] and enter this URI: http://purecodes.org/f-spot/0.5 if you are using a 0.5 release, http://purecodes.org/f-spot/0.6 if you are using latest git.
- Then go to [Install Add-Ins…] and select the add-in you want.
- If they don’t appear in the [Tools] menu, delete ~/.gnome2/f-spot/addin-db-000 and restart F-Spot
My workflow:
- I import all my RAWs from the camera into F-Spot. There I have an overview and I can select or delete the shots I want or don’t want.
- Opening the RAW files I want to process with Bibble. There are three ways to to this.
- Copying the file name rightclicking in F-Spot, open the file open dialog in Bibble, paste file name, press enter. I don’t like this method very much, but it works always.
- Using the desktop-file and the little script passing URIs to Bibble I sent months ago to this list. With this I can right click -> open with -> Bibble to open the RAW file with bibble. See here: http://purecodes.org/f-spot/open-uri-with-bibble/ (there is a script which shows the directory of the selected photo in nautilus, too). You’ll need to adjust paths (script location, bibble installation, lite or pro, and so on), the desktop files goes to /usr/local/share/applications/ for example. The Problem of this method: It only works if Bibble is not open. If you started Bibble yet, it does not take any filenames.
- Using the add-in I wrote: http://purecodes.org/f-spot/SendToBibbleQueue/. This add-in appears in the tools-menu if you install it. It sends the paths of all the selected photos to a Bibble work queue called “F-Spot” (~/.bibble/work/F-Spot.work). The problem: Bibble does not recognize any changes in the workgroup files if started. I’ll contact the Bibble people regarding this. The workaround: Just copy the work queue in Bibble to make the changes visible there. Not nice, but it works. Or just keep Bibble closed until you add all the files you want to the work queue.
- Next step: processing the RAW files and storing TIFFs or JPGs. I configured Bibble so that the processed files are stored in the same directory and with the same name (of course with different file extension) as the RAW files.
- Reimporting the processed files in F-Spot. There are several ways:
- 1. Use the import function of Bibble, select ~/Photos/YYYY/MM/DD of the photo and import the new ones. Workes more or less.
- 2. Use the import add-in I wrote: http://purecodes.org/f-spot/ImportRawProcessed/ Don’t expect very much. This tool just searches for any file in the directory of the selected RAW(s) that does have the same filename without extension. If my RAW file I selected is /home/paul/Photos/2007/12/03/dsc_4206.nef, the tool searches for all /home/paul/Photos/2007/12/03/dsc_4206.*.
As I am not using the RAW/JPEG-version-merging add-in as I want to keep my RAW files and my processed files as different photos (just to be able to separate them by filtering and searching), this works for me. My import add-in could be modified so that it will import the processed file as new version and not as new photo.
Don’t know if you are interested in all these, but I just wanted to tell it. Perhaps the add-ins are useful, perhaps not. If you have an idea to simplify my workflow, please tell me. :-)
Follow-Ups: