On importing pictures from a camera via USB, f-spot does not have the ability to delete the pictures from the camera when the import is done. It also does not allow you to select where the pictures are being saved to. It also launches into the full Fspot program when finished, which is usually not needed.

This forces me to manually delete the pictures from the camera one at a time, which is time consuming.

Gthumb, by contrast offers to delete the pictures after import and makes it easy to choose where the pictures are being saved to. For a new user, the gthumb interface is not confusing to simply view the pictures that are just imported, whereas the f-spot interface is very confusing and intimidating.

I have set up many Ubuntu systems for new users coming from Windows and they are looking for a "Windows picture import wizard" experience where at the end, the wizard offers to exit, leaving the pictures where ever you just saved them to.

Once I install Gthumb and set the preferences, they are very happy. They can explore f-spot later. For now, they just want a simple way to view the pictures they just imported.

In my office I use digital pictures a lot, but f-spot is very unstable and time consuming to use, often, locking up x and requiring an alt/sysreq/k to recover because even ctrl/alt/backspace doesn't work. I am running Ubuntu 8.04.3 in my office and all 6 of my workstations behave the same way with f-spot. I use gthumb to quickly import and delete from camera and I'm done.

This carries over to my home use where my 4 Ubuntu machines are running 9.10, but I still don't use f-spot to import because of the lack of the delete and save to feature.