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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.
We all know that Mono is the cause of F-Shot's stability issues...right?
The concern is not so much about the language itself as with Microsoft. They've *said* they won't sue anyone using/writing for Mono, but since they've threatened to do some very similar things and I'm not so sure I trust them.
In any case, the intensity with which Icaza has been pushing Mono, plus his ties with Microsoft, scare the crap out of me.
So please, feel free to develop with it. But I'm not so sure I'll be installing Mono to run your app, because I try to keep it off otherwise.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Meh, as long as F-Spot and Mono remain in the repository, I have little issue with them moving to Shotwell if they feel it's the better product (for whatever reason, be it phantom legal issues, or legitimate stability issues).
The real issue is with patents. Stallman wrote about this last year.
http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
Similar to WINE in a way, it's good to have an open source project to allow us to run more software. However, that doesn't mean that software developers should make their applications depend on them when specifically targeting a GNU/Linux environment - it's an unnecessary risk.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
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.
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..
> I LIKE c#/.net.
Someone always pops up saying something like this anytime Mono is mentioned. But if C#/.Net/Mono is so great why hasn't anything really great been created with it in all the years it has existed? Remember when Microsoft was going to recode pretty much all of their userland? yea right. Reminds me of when belief in the Java hype pushed Corel under as they thought they could write a cross platform office suite with it. So show me something Mono/.Net based that that is awesome and where the choice of platform was something more a technical than a political/religious decision.
But beyond that, the fact is we are talking about a technology controlled by Microsoft. Many people simply do not trust them, and for good reason. So using Mono to allow otherwise foreign code to run is unobjectionable. Creating core subsystems of the Free Software/Open Source environment isn't. Any distribution that breaks if Mono is removed is going to be unacceptable to a large enough subset of users that it simply isn't likely to happen in any of the top ten distros.
Democrat delenda est
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
No it's not. Ubuntu has never been a distribution for Free software activists. Ubuntu has always been about "linux for humans". That's why there is always fuss over the nvidia drivers, that's why they made a fuss over the firefox branding. If your primary concern is with freedom then you should be on a different distribution such as Gnewsense or Debian. Ubuntu however has always been about ease of use over making things difficult and just so we're clear here.. Both F-Spot and Shotwell are Free Open Source Software, it's just that some people don't like using mono.
The REAL question however is, does this new Photo Manager provide an adequate replacement for the Ubuntu user and the answer is "not yet". It doesn't import certain images, it imports duplicates, its UI is not that great compared to f-spot and it has less import/export options then f-spot. Regardless of how you feel about Mono it sucks for Ubuntu's target audience which doesn't care about Mono or C#, they care about if they can use it.
I think the only news worthy part of this is that it's a ridiculous decision that they're considering to switch to an inferior product by default. Add on the fact that they removed GIMP by default from Lucid it means that there will now be no way by default to edit images in Ubuntu for the next release that won't open in Shotwell. It's just completely stupid and I doubt Canonical will stick with this decision. Ubuntu is popular because they don't do this kind of thing.
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.
There are a few developers who I feel indebted to. Icaza is one. I use Midnight Commander every day. I give these developers "the benefit of the doubt". Icaza is up there with Bram Moolenaar (VIM). VIM is more important, but MC also "gets it done". And has for almost 15 years.
So, when Icaza said "Mono is important", I tried to suspend my disbelief. And, it was difficult for me; the JVM also had a 15 year history for me.
I'm STILL trying to see it. I "dutifully" installed Moonlight into Firefox. I've tried F-Spot. But, there appears to be no broad-base support for the CLR, even now. No CLR support for Unix... To quote a Microsoft MVP
"Shinma,
I would not recommend trying to run .NET on a unix platform. While
there are attempts (there is a CLR based on a source project released by MS
named ROTOR, and there is also the MONO project), not all of the
functionality is there.
What are you trying to do? Which parts of the framework do you want to
leverage? I think that there might be an ASP.NET implementation up and
running.
--
- Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]"
Now, MONO claims to have Solaris support, but I haven't yet tried it (can you get support for this from Novell?) And what about AIX and HP-UX?
JAVA supports these platforms, and so appears to be a more universal delivery system.
Was Icaza wrong? Maybe. It is possible that the CLR offers features that are not possible with the JVM (I don't know, the only thing I have personally done in this space is a COBOL to JVM system, and I haven't ever really looked at CLR -- after all Alchemy offers a commercial COBOL to CLR compiler already).
Now, I have never stressed F-Spot, but what I did try appeared to work just fine. I'm all for competition, and if the CLR is superior to the JVM, let it win! I just don't understand why it hasn't been pushed into the Unix space. Are IBM, HP and Oracle wrong?
Just curious on the thoughts of some fellow developers here. Especially from those companies. Some insight would be valuable.
Thanks, Ratboy666
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
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.'"
geeqie is what it's called under the new Author. Crappy name but it really is the best gtk image viewer.
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.
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
> 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.