With a ‘major’ new release of photo management application Shotwell just around the corner, brave souls willing to help test the app before release are being sought.

Writing on the Shotwell mailing list, Shotwell developer Lucas Beelerwrites: –

“Shotwell 0.11 packs a boatload of new features that make organizing your photo collection easier and that improve support for working with RAW images. For example, Shotwell’s tags mechanism now allows you to create hierarchical trees of tags by nesting one tag inside another — just right-click any tag name in the sidebar and choose “New” to create a new child tag!

For photographers who shoot RAW photos, Shotwell now treats RAW+JPEG pairs as a single unit and allows you to use the developments of RAW photos created by your camera if they’re available.

Version 0.11 brings to Shotwell several of the features most often requested by users — so we’re very excited! You can help us help you by checking out the most recent development version of Shotwell from our git repository and putting it through its paces, reporting any bugs you find.”

Shotwell 0.11 Hierarchal Tags
Shotwell 0.11 Hierarchal Tags at work

How to test Shotwell 0.11

The Shotwell repository is hosted on ‘git’. This means you need to either install the ‘git‘ package from the Ubuntu Software Centre to ‘pull’ the source code.

With Git installed run the following command in a new Terminal session: –

Next up we need to install the dependencies for Shotwell. We’ll do this via the Terminal for simplicities sake: –

  • sudo apt-get install libgconf2-dev libgee-dev libgexiv2-dev libglib2.0-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgudev-1.0-dev libexif-dev libgphoto2-2-dev libraw-dev libsoup2.4-dev libxml2-dev libsqlite3-dev m4 libunique-dev libwebkit-dev valac libjson-glib-dev

If you’re using Ubuntu 10.10 you will also need to add the Vala PPA @ launchpad.net/~vala-team/+archive/ppa

With everything installed and code pulled it’s time to build.

Head back to the Terminal and enter the following commands one at a time, hitting the return/enter key after each: –

  • cd
  • cd shotwell/
  • ./configure
  • make

Now prepare for a bit of a wait – this bit can take a while…

Once all done you can launch Shotwell 0.11 by running: –

  • ./shotwell

To install Shotwell 0.11 system wide (for full integration) run: –

  • sudo make install
Report bugs encountered at redmine.yorba.org/projects/shotwell/issues

Thanks to Akshat