Linux Road

The announcement of beta version of Ubuntu 10.10 came with the news that Shotwell will be replacing the good old (and trusted) F-Spot as the default photo manager. This is when I first heard of Shotwell and since Ubuntu were showing so much trust in it, I thought it would be worth while to do a review on Shotwell. Even though most people are talking much about the F-Spot and Shotwell war, but I want to make a point that this is no Shotwell v/s F-Spot post. It is a simple review on Shotwell, talking about the strengths and weaknesses of it.

Shotwell can be found in the package repository of most of the distributions and can be installed directly from there. Just open your package manager search for "Shotwell" and install the package. But, if your distro doesn't have it in the package repository you can see the installation details on the official Shotwell install page (http://yorba.org/shotwell/install/) to install Shotwell.

Interface

First thing you will notice about Shotwell's interface will be that it is very simple (a bit too simple). The Shotwell windows contains two panes. A left pane showing photos and events, with photos containing all the pictures in the library and events having the photos arranged in according to the date on which they were taken. The right pane quite obviously shows the preview of images.

Below the right pane we have some very useful buttons and a small slider (to increase the size of the thumbnails). There are by default four buttons (I would prefer to have a few more) Rotate, Enhance, SlideShow, and Publish. Each doing exactly what it say. The image details are shown just below the left pane.

Editing

You can double click on an image to open it in the edit mode. The edit mode offers Red-eye Reduction, Cropping, Rotating, Image Enhance (corrects the image colors, brightness, and sharpness automatically), and Adjust button that allows the user to change attributes for exposure, saturation, tint, temperature, and shadows. Image editing is quite fair, not a lot of options and the ones that are present are quite handy according to my likings.

Publishing

This is a nice and handy mode that allows user to publish/upload photos to facebook, picasa, and flickr albums. There are just three options for now I hope to more will be added later on. just select an image and press the publish button to upload. You will have to put your login details before uploading.

Slideshow

When you click the Slideshow button under the right pane, you will see a full page preview of the image which will switch to the next one after a delay of 5 sec. (delay can be set manually too). Again the simplicity can be seen the Slideshow mode as well, with just five buttons visible: back, pause/play, next, setting, and exit mode. Setting button allow you to set the delay time before the next image is displayed.

Taging and Events

Tagging has become an important feature in any modern photo managing software and so did Shotwell included the feature of tagging the images. Simple select an image click on the tag option in the menu bar to add or modify a tag. Events that are by default present as dates can be renamed to represent an event for your own ease.

Final Words

Shotwell should get my full marks for its simplicity and ease of use. It might not be as attractive as F-Spot but that is a matter of choices. Some features need to be added and polished, I would like to have more places to publish images directly. Overall, it is a very handy tool and the project overall seem to be heading in a good direction. Most Ubuntu users will miss F-Spot but they can install it manually but I would certainly recommend giving Shorwell a try.