F-Spot's import dialog is inconsistent with the built-in Nautilus import's

The problem here seems to lie in Step 4:
"4. Uncheck the option that says to copy the photos to Photos, since you have your own folder organization scheme."

You've told F-Spot not to copy your files, and thus leave them exactly where it found them. It simply adds their information to the database, and refers to the files in their original location.

If you want to use your own folder scheme, you must copy your photos manually to wherever you want them before importing.

I was sure I remembered it doing things differently. Perhaps that is just in the Nautilus interface.

Could it maybe be made clearer that if you do not check that box, it isn't just not copying them to Photos but not copying them at all? Is this interface consistent with the way that the Nautilus plugin handles it?

CLARIFICATION

In the Nautilus interface -- the thing that you get by clicking the F-Spot button in Nautilus, when browsing your digital camera or a photo-containing memory card -- the dialog box is called "Select Photos to Copy from Camera ... " and only the highlighted photos are actually copied. Furthermore, it includes a "Target location" selector which lets you decide where you want to put the photos when they are copied over.

The problem is technically user error here, but the error was caused by an inconsistent interface. I thought that F-Spot's own import dialogue worked the same way as the one built into Nautilus, and made some unfortunate decisions based on that. I also was working from the assumption that pics I was seeing in F-Spot's main interface had already been copied to my hard drive, since I was unaware that they could be catalogued without copying them ... or that I could go through the whole import dialog, and have all my pictures show up on the screen, without my pictures actually being imported. I honestly thought that the "Copy to photos" option was like the "Target location" selector, just more limited.

Perhaps this bug should be changed to something like "F-Spot's import dialog is inconsistent with the built-in Nautilus import's"?

I concur about the inconsistency. In fact, that's been a pet issue of mine for a while now. In my case, I want F-Spot to always keep my photos in it's own directory structure, which the Nautilus F-Spot import dialog does not permit.

I've never liked the idea of having two different dialogs to accomplish the same task, especially when the available options are different between the two.

That said, as far as I can tell this dialog does not exist anymore in Ubuntu 9.10. I've started an import in a variety of ways, and F-Spot always opens with it's own import dialog.

I see you're running Linux Mint 7, based on Ubuntu 9.04 which did indeed have the two separate dialogs.

I also agree with your proposed new title for this bug, and will make that change.

On further review, the dialogs we are talking about are the F-Spot Import dialog, launched by clicking import in F-Spot, vs. the dialog provided by the command f-spot-import. f-spot-import is provided with F-Spot, so any issues with its design would have to be reported upstream.

Some more thoughts here, after testing a few things.

The dialog that f-spot-import produces is the F-Spot gphoto importer, for handling direct imports from various digital cameras.

Also, the ability to select the target directory in that dialog is not an official F-Spot feature, but rather the result of an Ubuntu patch. It is ubuntu_importer-targetdir-selector.patch.