Although F-Spot currently maintains the comfortable position as the default image management and editing application in Ubuntu 10.04, Maverick will see the much-derided application dethroned in favour of photo management application Shotwell.
The decision, confirmed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, had long been mooted.
What’s Shotwell?
The developers describe it as: –
“…a digital photo organizer designed for the GNOME desktop environment. It allows you to import photos from disk or camera, organize them in various ways, view them in full-window or full-screen mode, and export them to share with others.”
Navigation
Like F-Spot Shotwell has an easy to navigate interface and both applications have many similar features such as Slideshow, tags, image editing, etc.
Where both applications differ is on the way they manage photos and, perhaps more importantly to some, resource usage: With a library of 50 photos F-Spot used 40MiB of RAM whereas Shotwell used just 15MiB.
Shotwell can export photos in-app to popular photo sharing services such as Flickr, Facebook and Picasa.
Shotwell: Interface
The left-hand pane in the main window lists two entries for viewing your digital image library: ‘Photos’
and ‘Events’. When tags are applied to photos a ‘tags’ entry will also display in the sidebar.
The default view is ‘Photos’ which displays all of the photos in your library. ‘Events’ groups photos by date, although you can rename the ‘date’ to something more descriptive such as ‘Sally Sue’s Party’ and, if applicable, ‘tags’ allows you to sort through photos by tags.
Editing
Shotwell also comes with a fantastic set of editing tools ranging from crop, auto-adjust, exposure, temperature, mirror and rotate.
Links:
Shotwell homepage: http://yorba.org/shotwell/
Shotwell Flickr group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/shotwell