Re: Why Shotwell?

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com>]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 1:57 PM, ceed <cdposter-gmane yahoo com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been reading recently that Shotwell is going to be the new default
> photo management tool for Ubuntu (and maybe even in Gnome). I'm an avid
> F-Spot user but installed Shotwell just to check it out. I can not see any
> reason why this should replace F-Spot, and when I read about Shotwell as the
> "future if Linux photo management" there's never anything about why it's
> should be the future. What is it that F-Spot supposedly is missing making
> Shotwell a better option? I'm not an applications developer, so I if it's
> something under the hood justifying this change I would not see it. As for
> functionality I find F-Spot alone to be a reason for using Gnome over KDE.
> There's nothing like it one Linux as far as I can see. I'm also worrying
> that if this change happens F-Spot is going to be left by the wayside.
> Please do not make that happen.

The F-Spot list is a bit of an odd place to ask this question ;)

Shotwell is definitely a young piece of software, so I agree that it's
strange everyone is immediately jumping to it. Still, keep in mind it
is developing at a fast pace. The latest version (0.6) was released
just a few days ago with a bunch of new features, so if you're basing
you assessment on 0.5* you may want to play with it again.

You may also find this informative:
http://gnomejournal.org/article/99/shotwell-photo-manager

One of my favourite things is its really smart non-destructive
editing. It maintains the original in a cute, magical, invisible and
optimized fashion one never needs to think about, with proper Undo /
Redo springing from there.

Really the big thing holding me off Shotwell right now is that it
lacks F-Spot's neat hierarchical tags feature, which has a special
place in my heart. It goes for the more conventional system where
there are a bunch of hard-coded methods for cataloguing organizing
photos and tags are just complementary meta-data.

There's also its lack of RAW+Jpeg support. Shotwell's non-destructive
editing precludes the need for Versions like F-Spot, so there's an
issue when I have two images that honestly come from different roots
but are, as far as a human is concerned, the same thing. It will never
lose the original, but it also does nothing for me if I do something
really invasive to a photo and want to call that a new version instead
of just a touch-up.

The first photo manager with graphical image histories (detailed and
hierarchical instead of just a 1D list of versions with funny names!),
smoothly represented in the image browser (maybe stacks of
thumbnails?), will win my heart for good.



Dylan