multi-computer photo editing workflow?

Posted on by Luis Villa

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good workflow for editing a large set of photos using at least two and probably three laptops? It should be able to do f-spot-like tagging and favorit-ing of pictures, as well as cropping, simple color adjustments, etc. Goal is for Krissa and I, working together but often on our own machines, to turn 5,000 unedited honeymoon pictures into a smaller, organized, cropped, etc., set of pictures.

I’d love to just use f-spot, but as best as I can tell there is no way to share an f-spot collection (files+metadata) across multiple machines/user accounts- happy to be wrong on that count if possible.

Published by Luis Villa

11 thoughts on “multi-computer photo editing workflow?”

  1. It’s not a great suggestion, but my wife and I do use f-spot for this. The photos and database are on a common server in our lounge room, and we network mount the relevant folder (orginally by sshfs, more recently via smbfs). The main trick seems to be making ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db on our laptops a symlink into the network share. It’s pretty clear that f-spot wasn’t really designed for this, but it seems to work…

    It’s far from perfect: fetching photos over the wireless can be pretty sluggish, we have to install plugins separately on each laptop, we have to keep the version of f-spot in sync (so think twice before upgrading your laptop to the latest ubuntu alpha unless you want to upgrade the whole house to it), etc. But it works tolerably well, and we haven’t found a better solution yet.

  3. Yeah, I agree with comment 1. As an extra tip, you can initially tag half the image with “Batch 1” and the other half with “Batch 2”, so each one of you knows what images to work on.

  4. You might be able to do this on multiple computers using F-Spot if you check on the option which says something to the effect of, “Write metadata out to image file.” That way things like tags and other metadata will be stored in XMP blobs in the image file which F-Spot should read and use accordingly when imported on a different computer. I am not sure it’ll work for different “versions” of the same image.

    At least, this is how I imagine it *should* work. You will obviously need to test it. :)

  5. gThumb seems much more practical for this kind of work. The separate search, collection and tag files are easy to rsync.

    Our method is a fairly standard year/month/date folder but keeping globally unique image filenames. The original is always left untouched. Every modified file has the same location and name as the original, but with “-m”. A suffix of “-am” denotes a specific author’s modified image. The image files are on a NAS. The tag and collection metadata are local.

    gThumb searches quickly update to reflect the touched files, which are pretty much all the interesting files. A sync of the collections and tags once in a while is easy.

    We would love to have embedded metadata for keywords and collections, but it just is not standardised or portable yet. (eg. one of us has a Mac and insists on iPhoto).

  6. >You might be able to do this on multiple computers using
    >F-Spot if you check on the option which says something to
    >the effect of, “Write metadata out to image file.” That way
    >things like tags and other metadata will be stored in XMP
    >blobs in the image file which F-Spot should read and use
    >accordingly when imported on a different computer. I am not >sure it’ll work for different “versions” of the same image.

    Yes and no. Unfortunately, the only thing written in the EXIF tag is the tag it-self (not its hierarchy). So loading collection from another F-Spot doesn’t recognize correctly the collection.

    As far as I understood it.
    This is a missing killer feature from F-Spot.

  7. I do something similar to comment #1 as well. In fact, you have to do something like that simply to share the photo collection between two users even on the same machine (minus the network filesystem, of course). Or, you could upload everything to Flickr or something and manage things there. None are ideal solutions, of course, and it would seem like F-Spot should be easily tweakable to support multiple users. Definitely would be useful!

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