I’d like to publicize an issue that the F-Spot developers have been slow to address:

<rant>

There is a good possibility that every photo you’ve imported to F-Spot has had its EXIF date tags altered without your permission and without F-Spot informing you that it has done so.

From bug reports going back over two years it is clear that F-Spot has a serious date problem.

What is the assigned severity of these bugs? Normal.

What is the status of these bugs? UNCONFIRMED.

How’s this for confirmation:

Mangled EXIF data as viewed by Gthumb

The above is a screenshot of the EXIF date information (as viewed by Gthumb) of a photo I imported to F-Spot version 0.6.1.3 for testing purposes. Prior to import, all three of the fields (DateTime, DateTimeOriginal, and DateTimeDigitized) had the same timestamp: 2009:10:26 13:37:11. This timestamp corresponds to when I took the picture: 13:37 on October 26th.

As can be seen, F-Spot has decided that the users are idiots and to update the fields with the values it thinks are best without telling anyone. It decided to set the DateTime field to the time when the photo was imported into F-Spot (as if that date is so important it needs to be saved for posterity). For DateTimeOriginal F-Spot decided that the appropriate time is the UTC time when the picture was taken (conveniently deciding that since my computer is currently in U.S Eastern Daylight Time, I must have been in the same timezone when I took the picture and that my camera was set to the correct time for my timezone at the time I took the picture). The EXIF date fields do not have timezone information in them so setting it to UTC is meaningless because there’s no way to tell from looking at the data that that is what you’ve set it to! The DateTimeDigitized field is the only one F-Spot left alone which gives us the strange paradox of the picture being digitized 4 hours before it was originally taken! <sarcasm>Yeah, that makes sense.</sarcasm>

This problem is so bad some users have resorted to writing perl scripts to try and fix things after the fact or launching the program in different ways to prevent the problem from happening. I am going to take the nuclear option and simply remove F-Spot from all of my computers.

An open letter to the F-Spot devs:

To whom it may concern,

Data corruption is ALWAYS a critical problem but you list bugs 340903 and 454082 as “UNCONFIRMED” with a severity and priority of “Normal”.

UNCONFIRMED? Normal? Who are you kidding? Data corruption is always critical and these bugs are years old and have been confirmed in your own bugzilla by dozens of users.

Regardless of whatever reason you had for introducing this stupid date-changing “feature”, you never change EXIF data unless the user expressly tells you to. That’s basic common courtesy.

You’ve known about this issue for over three years. You need to grow up, acquire a clue, and fix F-Spot’s terrible and destructive behavior. Yesterday.

Until then I will distrust F-Spot and anyone who says it is anywhere close to being a good, decent, or even “ok” photo manager. You and others keep telling me that F-Spot is awesome, that F-Spot is great, that it is the best Linux photo manager. I no longer believe you. From now on F-Spot is not getting anywhere near my photos. I’ve written about you before but I take all the good things I said then back. I was younger, more impressionable, and foolish. But those are just excuses. The fact is I was wrong. Yes, you appear to have some nice features, but your core has some rotten bits and I don’t eat rotten apples (even if only bits of them are rotten), I throw them away.

Goodbye,

Daniel Bartholomew

</rant>

Case in point:

My Two Dell Orders

Last month I ordered a laptop from Dell (a Studio XPS 13 with Ubuntu) and some accessories to go along with it. The accessories were shipped immediately and arrived a few days after the order. I have not been so lucky with the main point of the purchase: the laptop itself.

It has now been almost a month since I ordered it and the laptop is still listed as “Pre Production”. If the Estimated Delivery Date is to be believed, I’ll get the laptop more than a full month after I ordered it.

First the laptop was set to be delivered on the 10th of September, which was OK. Then Dell silently pushed the date back to the 15th which was not OK, but I could live with it. Then last week they emailed me to see if it was alright if they pushed the date back to the 29th (and if I didn’t respond with an OK they said they would cancel the order).

In the email they said if I had any questions I should send them an email and ask them, so I did (I asked them why) and this was the response I got back:

Thank you for your response. Please accept our sincere apology for any inconvenience or confusion this may have caused. We, Dell‘s Delayed Order Notification Team, are solely responsible for informing our customer(s) about potential delays to the delivery of their order(s). If you would like more specific order information you may contact one of our customer care representatives at 1-800-456-3355 (Small Business) or 1-800-624-9897 (Consumer). You may also check the status of your order at www.dellcustomercare.com.

Thank you,

Dell Inc. Notification Team

So first they say if I have questions to contact them, and then when I do they say that they actually don’t know anything and to contact some other team at Dell. Classy, Dell. Real classy. They could, you know, have just forwarded my questions to the appropriate group.

It’s bad enough that Dell’s Ubuntu offerings are second-class citizens on their site (there was a promotion on when I ordered where you could get an Ubuntu-powered Dell Mini 10 for $99 if you ordered the Windows version of the Studio XPS laptop with no such deal for the Ubuntu version of the same hardware), now Dell is having trouble even shipping things on time.

I’m seriously considering a personal boycott of Dell products. It’s a shame too, they build nice servers….