One of the largest drawbacks to the use of F-Spot in the professional management of large quantities of images and numerous sets of images is the inability to export the images in a meaningful removable archival format.

While it may be feasible to select a series of photos and select one of the current export features such as export to Flickr or even to a local folder it would be a wonderful feature if there was an option that would enable a user to backup the entire catalog to any removable media such as CD-R / DVD-R, External Hard drive, Networked Device, or even old school tape drives in one fell swoop.

The use of a non-rewritable and finite medium such as a CDR of course requires the inclusion of the ability to do such automated tasks as disc spanning and in the case of a tape drive or external hard drive a scheduled periodic backups to be run at certain times or in certain events (such as the end of day close of the application). 

The reason I suggest this is that like many people who work with graphic media files I find that I am much more confident with an application knowing that sitting on my shelf or on a removable USB drive (thumb, harddrive, or other USB storage device) is an archive that can be restored with little or no manual labor. This type of a feature reassures me that in the case of a drastic emergency such as a co-worker unknowing moving-altering files or deleting data or even worse say a total hard drive failure or fire there remains a way to quickly restore the information in a reasonably painless procedure.

Another export feature for backup that might be considered is the backup of each images version to a Gmail.com account. It would be an excellent way to both store and remotely reference photos either one at time via the email interface or possibly by using compressed zip or tars to send multiple versions or sets to a Gmail.com for long term remote storage.