Re: [Shotwell] GSOC idea: Shotwell RAW developer integration

[Lucas Beeler <lucas yorba org>]

Hi Camilo,

I'm Lucas, the Shotwell tech lead. I'm also the person who has
mentored our GSoC students for the past two years. I discussed your
project with Jim Nelson, Yorba's executive director, and we're very
interested in your proposal. When selectable RAW development was first
spec'd in the spring of 2011, there was talk of a third RAW developer,
which we planned to call either "User" or "Custom." As you know,
Shotwell today supports two developers labeled "Camera" and
"Shotwell." Your proposal essentially describes support for a "User"
or "Custom" RAW development that is created via a round-trip through
an external RAW editor. Since we've wanted something like this in
Shotwell for a long time, we're enthusiastic about your proposal and
we feel confident about managing it -- especially since your project
goals are well-scoped and well-defined.

We did a great deal of work on improving RAW support in Shotwell 0.14.
While Shotwell is predominantly a photo manager, we see Shotwell as a
critical part of any pro-level photography workflow on the free
desktop. Suffice to say, another critical part of such a workflow is a
tool for developing RAW images into JPEGs, so we view any project that
seeks to integrate the two as a good thing not only for Shotwell but
for pro photo users on Linux in general.

I'll express our interest in mentoring you to the GNOME Foundation
(which administers Shotwell GSoC projects) and we'll go from there!

Cheers,
Lucas

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 10:31 PM, Camilo Polymeris <cpolymeris gmail com> wrote:
> Hello Shotwell users and developers,
>
> I have been using Shotwell for a while now. This, plus rawstudio and
> the GIMP compose my main photo workflow. The interaction between
> Shotwell and rawstudio is problematic, though, because the photo
> databases are separate. Shotwell gets confused when you delete
> pictures from within rawstudio, duplicate jpegs show up if you export
> from rawstudio, RAWs and jpegs are unlinked, etc.
> A few months ago I suggested a way to better integrate RAW development
> software like UFraw, rawstudio, raw therapee, and many others into
> Shotwell. In the mailing list thread[1] I described a solution very
> similar to what I gather is planned from reading Feature Request #3061
> ("improve interaction with external RAW editors")[2].
> This consists of --before calling the external developer software--
> watching for changes to a "*_developed.jpeg" file, and passing this
> filename in the commandline, or similar. UFraw has had the capability
> to export to a set file for a while, using the --output command line
> option, and my patch to add that feature to rawstudio (called "client
> mode")[3] was accepted a while ago.
> Now, the Shotwell side is still missing. I played around with
> implementing it during last (austral) summer, not completing it,
> because I could not afford to spend too much time on it. Still, it
> helped get an idea of the dimensions of the problem. I understand, in
> the meanwhile, improvements of RAW handling have been made, which
> --due to that segfault that prevents me from running the latest
> version-- I haven't tested yet .
> My idea would be to develop this missing piece during this year's
> Google Summer of Code[4], maybe under the umbrella of Gnome. I have
> successfully taken part in this program during the past 2 years. I
> think the scope of this project is about right for the 12 weeks of
> GSoC.
> I would first focus on rawstudio and UFraw integration, and if time
> permits, add others later. If necessary, like I did with rawstudio,
> patches can be submitted to those projects, too.
> Any comments or suggestions are very welcome.
>
> Looking forward to contributing back to the project,
>
> Camilo
>
> [1] http://lists.yorba.org/pipermail/shotwell/2012-June/004067.html
> [2] http://redmine.yorba.org/issues/3061
> [3] http://bugzilla.rawstudio.org/show_bug.cgi?id=556
> [4] http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013
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