Linux for Designers

F-Spot is my favorite photo management software at all. Now it is available as version 0.6:
* no longer depends on libeog
* fighting against deprecation, on the path to gnome3
* new viewer widget
* new widget showing folders organisation
* new Preference dialog
* db and config moved to .config (or whatever is pointed by xdg config)
* tons of bugs fixed (really)
* updated translations

Check out Ruben Vermeersch blog post about this release too! To bad there is no Ubuntu Jaunty built at the moment (please can some build it )

UPDATE 090810
Now a Ubuntu Deb package of F-Spot 0.6.0 is available (thanx to Carnophage for the hint).

Ruben Vermeersch answers about: Is F-Spot Live and kicking?
Yes it is There are several real interesting things going on:
* Mike Gemünde is currently cleaning and refactoring quite a lot of IconView code
* Geotagging is coming (Mike Gemünde is working on it too)
* Paul Wellner Bou is working on a nice extension to compare different image versions
* Lorenzo Milesi is working on export support to tabblo and taking care of bugzilla
* Ruben Vermeersch himself working on prototyping some stuff related to progressive image loading and preloading. He is also looking into RAW processing

Read the complete post and check out the screenies!

My favorite photo management software is F-Spot. Now the new 0.5 version, including all the F-Spot GSoC projects is available:
* new sidebar, reworked editors
* color profile support
* duplicate detection at import
* reworked db interractions
* reducing and batching db access
* light-speed tagging
* FullScreen mode enhancement
* new extensions, updated docs, updated translations
* hundreds of bugfixes
UPDATE: You can get it for Ubuntu Hardy here
http://www.soccio.it/michelinux/2008/09/21/new-f-spot-050-build-for-ubuntu/en/

The GSoC F-Spot Color Profile project are now in alpha state or like Wasja wrote in his blog: "So all big bugs with color profiles were fixed".
Ruben made a huge speed improvement for tagging in SVN too. More about his sidebar work can be found in his blog.
BTW if you like to know what's going on in the GSoC projects check out the Planet SoC blog.

At Ubuntuproductivity i found an interesting article about photo management with digital cameras and the RAW image format. There i discovered Bibble for the first time. All other software is well known with it's pros and cons. blueMarine is not listet/ testet in that article which is still in development too.

A good question by Linux Photography. Did we need really image viewers like gThumb? I personally belief in the thumbnail features of Nautilus and didn't need one anymore. Ok, for reviewing photos i use F-Spot

With F-Spot 0.4.4, the first version influenced by Googles Summer of Code is available, this release adds some cool enhancements and a better integration in the Gnome Desktop using GIO. F-Spot is a full-featured personal photo management application with a modern interface.
* FullScreen enhancements: fading widgets, snapped on screen edges, ...
* rating with hotkeys: Alt-0 to Alt-5 in browse or edit mode
* reduce startup time by ~40%
* push back the "sort tag by popularity"
* choose the theme you prefer for f-spot
* reduce the verbosity of the output log
* migrate CDExport to gio for gnome 2.22
* an insane amount of other fixes, new capabilities,
updated translations and refactoring

I love F-Spot and i'm happy to read that there will be nice improvements as a Summer of Code project featured by Google. Ruben Vermeersch will improve the sidebar like some mockups of Jimmac shows .

F-Spot, a full-featured personal photo management application with a modern interface, is official released as 0.4.2. It shpped with many bugfixes and some feature enhancements:
# rating and filter on rating
# auto-upgrade db from sqlite2 to sqlite3
# expose the stores through dbus
# MonoDevelop solution file
# new extensions

F-Spot 0.4.1 the full-featured personal photo management application is released. It comes with interesting new features like:
* .arw support (sony A100)
* New extensions: RawPlusJpeg, DevelopInUFRaw, SyncCatalog
* Reworked TagView
* Inhibit/Unhinibit the screensaver in slideshow
...and bug fixes and translation updates too.