Vacations and Camera Frustration

Last evening, I got back from a three-day trip to San Juan with Kate. It was a great vacation -- the islands are beautiful, we had some really nice (albiet expensive!) meals, and there's a lot of nice hiking and pretty countryside. We stayed at a B&B called "Olympic Lights", which is basically an old farmhouse that has been converted to serve as an inn by a nice older couple; I would recommend it to anyone else spending a night out there (but they only have 4 rooms, so you'll need to book in advance if it's a busy weekend).

Anyway, in the course of this vacation, I took a pile of photographs with my camera. This was sort of the last straw for me: I've been slowly accumulating tons of digital images and just dumping them in a nearly-unstructured pile, and the thought of adding these new images onto the heap was too much. So, I decided to bite the bullet and try out some of the image-management programs that have cropped up over the last few years. Sadly, none of them could really do what I want. It seems pretty simple to me; I really just need a program that can:

• Import my existing images into its database, preserving structure if appropriate.
  
• Store my images in some sort of database structure which allows me to quickly find pictures corresponding to a particular date (or a particular series of images copied off the camera at once) or relating to a particular subject. For instance, sorting into albums/subalbums (i.e., directories) or attaching tags to the images would fulfill this requirement.
  
• View subsets of the database (e.g., individual albums, or all the images more recent than 5/2/2005) as thumbnails.
  
• Easily and efficiently perform lossless rotation of images by selecting one with the arrow keys and hitting a hotkey -- clicking down to a sub-sub-menu option does not qualify. Bonus points for batch operations (or the ability to safely perform rotations in the background).
  

Unfortunately, my brief survey came up empty. Only a few programs really seem to provide an abstract "view" of my collection of images, and those often make it far too annoying to perform the one image manipulation operation that I really want, lossless rotation (and that's despite providing a huge number of redundant editing functions that would be better performed in the GIMP). For instance, to rotate images in digikam, you have to pop up a new window (obnoxious) and perform a lossy rotation. (Note: after installing the kipi-plugins package, I now have a 'rotate' option from a context sub-menu, but I have no idea if it's lossless; in any event, it's far too inconvenient to be seriously useful in fixing up a batch of images that I'm copying off my camera). album-shaper struck out immediately for not having a recursive import function -- yeah, I'm going to individually click down to every single one of the dozens of directories where I already have pictures. Right.

Perhaps the closest program to what I want was f-spot, which basically puts your whole image collection in date order and lets you place images in categories using "tags". Unfortunately, it seems to be very immature -- double-clicking on an image reliably crashes it, some perfectly fine images show up with blank thumbnails, and while rotation buttons/menu items are present, they don't actually do anything (it's not documented whether they are supposed to do anything, and if so, whether they'd be lossless). And I have to say that the tagging interface is annoying enough that I wonder if I'd actually want to use this over the long-term: you have to navigate a bunch of submenus in order to pick a tag, rather than (say) choosing from a permanently available list of checkboxes. This is made especially annoying by the fact that there is a permanently available list of checkboxes, but it's used to limit the display rather than modifying the selected image.

I guess the old adage is right: if you want something done properly, you need to do it yourself. So many things to do properly, so little time...