Today started off as rather a non-day. I intended it to be such, having told myself I wasn’t going to touch any work at all today and have some time off.

In particular, I vowed I wasn’t going to do any more coding on the semi-work related monitoring tool I’ve been writing in Python over the last week, and which has been taking up large amounts of my time, both at home and at work. I tried doing some more work on it yesterday whilst at work, but I just couldn’t focus at all and ended up just watching Big Brother on the plasma screen in the office. I’m hoping having a day away from it will help and I can be more productive tomorrow.

So looking for something else to do (aside from putting my washing out on the line and having to bring it in half an hour later because it’s pouring with rain) with my day, I ended up installing F-Spot on my computer to have a play around with it.

It took a few minutes to import the fourteen thousand or so digital photos in my Photos directory, but it did so without a hitch, leaving me ready to begin the laborious process of adding tags to the photos to describe their content. I was a bit sceptical about how managing your photos in an iPhoto-type application was better than just arranging them in subdirectories on my hard disk as I’d been doing until now, but now I’m a complete convert. Having all your photos available in a single place that you can browse by date or by the people in them, or by the place they were taken at just rocks and I’m discovering photos I’d forgotten I even had.

Suddenly looking through my photos is a pleasure rather than a chore, and I’m hoping that this will help me put together the photography portfolio that I’ve been wanting to do for a little while now. All thanks to F-Spot, which is possibly the first bit of Novell software I’ve used that actually works.