How to Install F-Spot in Ubuntu Linux 10.10 and 11.04 Natty Narwhal?

F-Spot is a pretty simple yet an elegant image organizing application for GNU/Linux written using the GTK2+ toolkit. Although in the past it used be the default image organizer in a lot of major GNU/Linux distributions such as Fedora or Ubuntu, etc but sometime ago, they decided to ditch F-Spot and replace it with Shotwell instead. 

It was actually Novell (who's now behind the amazing OpenSuse Linux - Qt/KDE based distribution, mainly) who created the F-Spot at first and then Gnome and others saw how cool it was :) and decided to add it to their distributions as well.

Staring with Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.10, now F-Spot is not included by default as said before but luckily it's not entirely ignored by Ubuntu team or others and especially in Ubuntu you can still install it via both PPA and official repositories nonetheless.

Main features...

*. Has the ability to work with 16 different image types such as - JPEG, GIF, TIFF, RAW, SVG (Vector 2D container format), etc.

*. Simple interface written in GTK2+.

*. Easily import photos from HDD, CD/DVDs or USB/Cameras, etc.

*. Tag and categorize easily.

*. Thumbnail previews (can change size).

*. Search.

*. Has a photo editor which lets you do things such as - Crop/resize/rotate or change colors, etc.

*. Zoom in-out.

*. Create Photo CDs.

*. Upload to online photo sharing websites such as - Flickr, Picasa Web, etc.

To be honest (maybe it's just my GNU/Linux Laptop but...) after using it for a while, I felt like the gThumb to be a bit faster when it comes to loading a lot of files into the main GUI and creating thumbnails, etc... when comparing the two.

Anyway, you can install the latest version of F-Spot (0.8.2) in Ubuntu 10.10 or 11.04 Natty Narwhal by entering the below command in your Terminal.

sudo apt-get install f-spot

Or you can use the PPA channel which should give you quick updates whenever the F-Spot developers release new versions quicker than the official repositories (as with the above command).

To do that, again enter the below command in your GNU/Linux OS Terminal.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:f-spot/f-spot-ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install f-spot

That should do it, enjoy!.