Proposed Photo managers for Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx

All of you would know by now that Ubuntu Devels are planning to remove GIMP as a default program. This has led to a lot of discussions among them about the default photo manager for Ubuntu Lucid that will compensate for it. They are not supposed to be as powerful as GIMP but should be able to handle some minimal image manipulations. In this article, we will look into the 3 top competitors F-Spot, Shotwell and Solang.

And we will see what all features each of them aims to provide to be considered as the default photo manager cum image manipulator and viewer for Lucid.

Shotwell

Shotwell is an opensource photo manager designed for Gnome Desktop Environment. Instead of just being a photo organizer it is capable of doing some small image manipulations too like reducing red-eye, rotate, crop and mirror photos.

It can act as a separate image editor and image viewer too i.e. you don't have to import images anymore. The TODO list includes implementing Facebook and Flickr export feature, creating slideshows with customizable music and transitions.

Solang

As far as the developers' views go, Solang doesn't aim to be a universal photo management and processing tool. It aims to act as a front-end for all photo-sharing containers, namely,Folders, CD/DVD, picasaweb, Flicker etc. They are planning to make it fast and flexible with powerful search capabilities and design.

Solang can be directly installed from the repos.

F-Spot

I don't think people are really happy with F-spot. It might seem to be a bit heavy but the complains about its importing everytime are wrong. I used to think the same but running it in view mode "f-spot --view" solves this problem, it doesn't import anything.

In a similar way, it can act as a small image editor too. No need to import anything. Though the developers may work on adding some more image manipulation features, slide show creating capability and online photo galleries export feature like Solang.

Inspite of the major three, there have been some other proposals too. e.g. to keep the F-spot as it is and instead add some image processing capabilities in EOG. The other tools proposed are gthumb and nautilus-image-converter.

I haven't tried Solang and Shotwell much, still a F-spot fan. But all of you linuxers can help the Developers decide which one should be used for the next LTS release. So, if you have tried any of the three, feel free to leave a comment sharing your view.