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Ubuntu Replaces F-Spot With Shotwell
climenole writes "Finally! The much discussed F-Spot vs. Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much-needed change; F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on the other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with the GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono."
So the summary is just copy/paste from some blog.
Gnome made the change, not Ubuntu.
That version of Shotwell has been out for well over a month.
This is not news, for nerds or for anyone.
For fuck sake, editors.
EDIT!
Shouldn't it then be named G-spot? If a program of such a name were to exist, would any male users be able to find it, let alone use it?
Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me.
Do we need such silly commentary?
I'm using Kubuntu btw, so I couldn't care less about F-Spot.
Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono.
I take issue with this last line. I LIKE c#/.net. If I get to use it in more places, this is a good thing.
Isn't the whole shtick about open source the fact that we get more options?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
You're just walked square into the middle of the "free software" vs "open source" debate. Now they've got you right where they want you, there is no escape!
Picasa is free (and awesome) but not open source - so Ubuntu and Fedora will never ship it.
I'm always glad to hear about mono being used less on Linux.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
or what ever they call it now
Not to toot my own horn, but that's Pinta (http://pinta-project.com/).
It's not ready yet to be a default application, but it's quickly getting closer. :)
I just downloaded shotwell from the PPA in the blog and here is my little test..
I made a folder with some random images. I put all the images in a sub folder and made another subfolder with an extra copy of one of the images in a different folder. I did this because this best represents my photo folder. It has lots of images in different places and some of them are the same image because an early version of f-spot messed it up.
I then loaded up shotwell and did an import, then got this error..
The 2 photos that it successfully imported were the same photo. F-Spot has a feature to not import the same photo twice even if the filename differs which is handy. For me this is no where near f-spot technically.
It can't even import PNGs. What use is an photo manager that can't import images..
Works with my camera (Logitech 9000) and my scanner (Canon u1240n aka Lide30) without any issues. The scanner was a nice surprise because installing the windows drivers for that was voodoo. Yes, Canon and Linux, it just works (tm). (I really didn't expect it to.)
You're just walked square into the middle of the "free software" vs "open source" debate. Now they've got you right where they want you, there is no escape!
Picasa is free (and awesome) but not open source - so Ubuntu and Fedora will never ship it.
I think you have it backwards. The "open source" crowd would happily use non-free software if they believe it is the best. The "free software" crowd would not touch Picasa. See this article for an example (jump to "bitkeeper issue").
You may be confused because of the two meanings of the word "free". It is sad that in the English language, the word for a concept as great as "freedom" is the same as the word for the meager idea of "no cost".
Of course, there are several shades of grey in between the two camps, but that is the main difference.
(That said, neither Ubuntu nor Fedora are very strong supporters of "free software"... specially not Ubuntu. It wouldn't surprise me that one of them decided to include picasa)
just had the same experience. png support will be added in 0.6. it's kind of ridiculous, but whatever, it's in 0.x. also going to fullscreen and then back appears to totally fuck the interface (ubuntu lucid).
also: no way (?) to zoom into images.
I don't know if I like the event paradigm. They should combine it with a date-based view like f-spot. My pictures are a combination of daily snapshots and events. Also I'd like a "random crap from the internet" dumppile which is totally separate from my life... Kind of like keeping Playboys away from the family photo album. :-/
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
As much as I like having one less set of libs to install I have to say shotwell is way behind F-Spot on the usability front. I would say Shotwell needs another year to mature before it gets even near what F-spot is "now". Ubuntu is a key representation of Linux on the desktop and if users have to deal with a very beta experience of shotwell I dare say it wont reflect positively on Linux as a whole (I personally prefer Digikam over F-Spot).
I have never heard about shotwell, so I went to its website (it would be nice if the article actually included a link to that). As far as I can tell, there are some important features missing from shotwell. Namely, there is no information about raw, integration with ufraw or another raw developing software, editing photos in external editors (GIMP), or running external filters on photos.
Also, it does not seem to have as many export options as f-spot.
I am definitely not happy with f-spot, and always keep looking for a replacement, but so far I was unable to find one, and, as far as I can tell, shotwell with its current set of features is not going work for me.
AccountKiller
There is this discussion from 2009..
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2009-December/010173.html
and this one from May 2010..
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2010-May/002569.html
Apart from that I can't find anything about a decision being made.
The problem is, I believe, that majority of people using GIMP for image editing would not use these buttons (I use GIMP quite heavily, and I know I would never use them), so for them (us), such buttons would just end up cluttering already pretty complicated user interface.
People often complain about GIMP user interface, which in my opinion is pretty good. The main problem IMHO is that the user interface is not flexible or configurable enough. For example the toolbox. When I bought my actual toolbox, the kind that sits in your garage, it came with a bunch of tools. I tossed half of them out, and replaced them with other tools, more useful for the way I work. However, I cannot do that with the GIMP toolbox. The same with menus. There is no easy way to reorganize the menus. I would like to, in addition to the existing menus, create a menu that would contain all commands that I use on daily bases for photo editing. In another menu, I would put all the command for creating and editing certain types of mathematical graphs, and so on.
GIMP is very flexible and powerful program, but its user interface is rigid and does not allow you to easily use all the flexibility and power. Unfortunately, most people complaining about the GIMP user interface seem to want even more rigid interface, with a single window and some sort of MDI interface. That, IMNSHO, would be a huge step backward.
AccountKiller
F-spot makes duplicates of my photos. Good riddance! One copy of each pic is enough, thank you!
XSANE should never be made available. The GUI is a complete mess, looking like something that belongs on the Amiga. Also, it has yet to work with a single scanner or webcam I throw at it.
xsane, or at least its libraries, forms the core of every scanner program for Linux worth using. The GUI is about the same as typical scanner programs released by manufacturers, which is to say it's weak but functional. Also, it has worked with every single scanner I have thrown at it for years and years... HP, Canon, Mustek... and I've been through about eight or nine scanners since I dropped Windows. In fact, my current scanner is an HP scanner for which there is no Windows 7 driver, the last release was on Vista, so the prior owners sold it. My prior scanner was another HP scanner for which there were no drivers after Windows XP. The one before that was a Mustek scanner which also last had XP drivers.
The plural of anecdote is not data, but you're outnumbered.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As long as developers keep rewriting apps from scratch every 2-3 years, they'll never become truly stable or usable. And they won't progress much beyond tech demos or the basic feature checklists.
When will we see true progress in integration, usability or features?
And people wonder why Ubuntu hasn't caught on yet...
And 10.10 is four months away from release.
They don't do PNG? What, are they writing their own image handling codecs from scratch? What kind of half-assed project doesn't build on the existing available libraries to handle low-level things like image formats? Even the first draft release of an image app should be able to just collapse all the format stuff behind an abstraction and get all of them in one swoop. Sure, they might not handle at the application user's level all the odd bits and extensions and tricky stuff (alpha transparency comes to mind, for example) but to just not support it? Sounds like someone needs to review a college first year CS textbook.
I've been following developments of gthumb lately and I've seem a significant increase in improvements the last year. I'm pretty sure it's triggered by competition with F-Spot and possibly Shotwell. The main reason for me to use gthumb is the superior import facility for your digital photos. You can store them in your own hierarchy/folders in the way you like it.
Who gives a tinker's spit about "managing" your "photos"? I want to edit images, so I'll install GIMP and set all the filetypes back where they belong. Iff I connect my camera, then perhaps I want to invoke something to offload selected pix and file them by date. F-Spot was about as useful as a wet paper bag at managing photos, with an incomprehensible interface and no editing.
XSANE should never be made available. The GUI is a complete mess, looking like something that belongs on the Amiga. Also, it has yet to work with a single scanner or webcam I throw at it.
I think I see your problem.. Stop throwing stuff. Peripherals tend to last longer without sudden impact.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
10.04 has simplescan nice and clean and easy to use. Does what's needed acquires images and uses libsane.
5 minutes with shotwell
Shotwell photo manager is a very simple and generally fast viewer, for some reason rotating a picture to the right is a lot faster than the same operation to the left.
Theres no keyboard shortcuts for the rotate feature instead its mouse orientated using the right mouse button a lot.
There is an enhance command but what it does I don't know.
other tools are available once you select a single photo for editing.
It's crop tool is pretty good but other adjustments are pretty basic and easy to make pictures appear worse.
The export to picassa feature is useful too.
shotwell isn't as good as f-spot but doesnt use mono
picassa wipes the floor with both of them but isn't native using wine.
picassa is my preference but shotwell can catch up its also available on windows
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
It is relevant because the reason they took GIMP out by default in Lucid was because people can edit images in f-spot. Now if they're replacing f-spot as well you can no longer by default edit PNG files and whatever else Shotwell doesn't support. That includes screen shots you take.
> I would assume the purpose of the application is to handle the user's own photo library, and how many digital cameras store photos in the PNG format?
Why just limit this to JPEGs? People have a lot of images from a lot of different
sources. It's foolish just to restrict an image manager just to one class of images
or a very narrow use case. This is especially true on Linux where you could have
all sorts of oddball end users all doing their own thing.
Any "manager" should handle everything and make that management as free of bother
as possible.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> GIMP is awesome, but it dosen't really fit into the "lightweight" niche.
If you are dragging in the rest of Mono just to have an image editor, it kind of does.
GIMP could sorely use some sort of "bookmarked UI" so that recently used stuff is
up front in a manner similar to iPhoto but without it being static. GIMP does some
stuff better because it's more sophisticated about how it does anything. The UI is
a bit of a drag though. Finding stuff can be cumbersome.
It's like searching through 1800 videos to find that show that you were watching
and didn't finish last night.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If they didn't seem to have such a hatred of KDE, they might consider digikam, which reportedly also has native ports to OSX and Windows now.
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