A new photo-orientated Lens for Unity that lets you browse through your Shotwell library and online Flickr collection is seeking testers.
The ‘Photo Lens‘ adds an easy-to-access photo-centric pane to your Unity Dash. It is powered by two ‘Scopes’ (search backends).
The Shotwell Scope makes your entire Shotwell library browseable through the Unity Dash and/or the Photo Lens. Searching by image name, event name, and by tag is currently supported, although the developers note that for the latter to be effective you must have the ‘write tags to metadata‘ option enabled in Shotwell’s preferences.
The Flickr Scope, which first requires authorisation, lets you search through your own Flickr collection as well as public photos, based on name, tag etc.
The ‘More Results’ button pinned to the bottom of Flickr results is especially useful. Clicking this reveals more and more public photos based on your search criteria.
Additional Scopes supporting Facebook and Picasa are planned for future releases.
How to Help Test
First install the Lens (and Scopes) by running the following commands in a Terminal: –
- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa
- sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install unity-lens-photo
Once successfully installed you will need to logout of your desktop session and back in again before the Lens is ‘enabled’.
Next step is to start using it as you would in everyday use. If you have a Flickr account be sure to authorise it for use with the Lens for the full experience.
Any bugs you encounter whilst testing the Lens and Scopes should be reported @ bugs.launchpad.net/onehundredscopes with [photo] written at the beginning of your bug report’s title.