“Will Banshee support Photo management?“

This is a common question both in the comments here but also in my private mails so I thought I would address it on OMG! Ubuntu! as my first editorial on the site.

Firstly this question stems from reading the slides from Banshee lead developer Aaron Bockover’s GUADEC 2009 talk on Banshee 2.0 (specifically slide 27) and ignoring the past slides as well as the use of the word platform. [more information]

Banshee now actually does Photos, it has been deployed for some months but got very little press adding to the misunderstanding surrounding this question. The 0.7.x development cycle of F-Spot which recently led to their LTS 0.8.0 release involved porting F-Spot to Hyena.

Hyena is a core part of Banshee but has previously been split out as its own separate project and it is part of the Banshee platform Aaron talked about in the slides and on his blog.

Hyena is what allows Banshee its powerful database features and allows for easily created custom widgets and UIs, all of which is now open for F-Spot (and other Hyena using projects like PDFMod) in the future.

So there you have it, Banshee actually already has Photo management support. It’s just called F-Spot.

As for the other items on the 2.0 list from 2009, some came true, some did not, still things happened which weren’t predicted or planned. But since I have fun answering Banshee questions I will leave it to the commenters to pick the next ones.

OMG people, the floor is yours.

Related posts:

1. Banshee gets new UI for Podcasts
2. Banshee 1.7.5 released with improved hardware support
3. Support GNOME by buying music in Banshee

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