Some people would like to try the new F-Spot 0.5 just to see the new features, and then rolling back to F-Spot 0.4, which till now looks stabler.

Actually the new F-Spot uses a different version of the database: upgrading F-Spot will upgrade the database, so rolling back to an old version of F-Spot will result in database damaging. Obviously it’s better to avoid this.

So ff you are planning to try F-Spot before switching to the new version, there are a few things you can do to save your work¹ .

First method. Make a backup of your F-Spot settings

To make a backup of your F-Spot settings, you only need to make a copy of the ~/.gnome2/f-spot/ folder, which is the place in which F-Spot store its database. You can navigate to that folder by using Nautilus, or run a simple command from the console:

cp -av ~/.gnome2/f-spot/ ~/.gnome2/f-spot.backup/

After you finished trying F-Spot 0.5 and you still like the 0.4 version, you can easily rollback by running:

rm -rf ~/.gnome2/f-spot/
mv ~/.gnome2/f-spot.backup/ ~/.gnome2/f-spot/

Those two lines will restore the backup you made and will delete all the work and the updates you made while trying F-Spot 0.5.

Second method. Run F-Spot with a new empy database

You can also run F-Spot without touching at all your old database by using the following:

f-spot --basedir /tmp  --photodir /tmp

This will store all the work you make during the try in the temporary directory, which will be deleted on your next reboot. F-Spot will not touch any of your old settings.

I already got database error: am I lost?

No, your aren’t. Everytime F-Spot gets an error loading the database it will try to restore it but will also make a copy of it in your home directory. So just have a look in your home: you will probably find a file called photos-20080924-0.db. The name could change a little bit: those numbers are the date in which the database was created, so in this case it’s 24th semptember 2008. After you find the file, you only need to copy it (do not move it, copy it) over the damaged database file, that is located in ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db. Just remind that this will be the database used by the 0.5 version, so you must use that version to load it (i.e. you cannot use 0.4 anymore).

1. we all know how long it takes to tag all the images [↩]