Response from Shotwell team founder

Editing should just move the original from X/foo.jpg to X/originals/foo.jpg, and it should throw it away if that file is already there (thus you only keep the most recent edit and the original). If other applications followed this rule as well then you could use any editor and still recover the original.

I would very much like to see a photo manager that just leaves the files where they were. You would give it a list of directories and it will act like the set of photos is every photo found in those directorys and any subdirectories. If a file is in a given directory it acts like it has a tag that is the directory name, as well as any tags that are in the EXIF data. Attempting to remove these "directory tags" would, I guess, move the files, perhaps with a warning. Or add a "not actually tagged with this" tag.

For Linux apps this almost is necessary, just so you can cooperate with some of those proprietary apps that insist on moving the files. For instance I would like to use it to at least look at an rsync copy of a iPhoto directory. If we are careful we should be able to at least change the tags and perhaps edit files and those apps will still handle it.

There may be an "import" but it would be for reading off of cameras and SD cards and other removable media, where you have a good reason to want a copy. The user should be able to choose what directory it goes into, and there should be programmable scripts (with some pre-supplied ones) to use dates and other EXIF data to place the files into subdirectories.