Derek Hildreth’s Blog

Fix-It: F-Spot Troubles - “object reference not set to an instance of an object”

Here’s the problem: you’ve used F-spot before to keep track of all your photos and for some reason (distro upgrade or re-importing) you needed to import those photos again into F-Spot. It should be easy, but unfortunately, you were met with a nasty “object reference not set to an instance of an object” message. This happened to me in F-Spot version 4.0. So, to investigate, I followed these bugs:
bug #484188
bug 304124
Bug 463789

Upon extra research, I stumbled across a post with an interesting observation. It seems that if the pictures were once in F-Spot’s catalog and then tagged while the option of “Write metadata to file” was enabled, then it would cause the aforementioned issue to occur. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what happened in my case, but anyways, onto the fix!

Basically, the problem has been fixed in the newest version of F-Spot (0.4.1 released 12/4/07) and it just needs to be upgraded to that. To do this, just use this command in the command line:
sudo yum --enablerepo=development update f-spot.i386

Enjoy!