A quick grumpy review of Shotwell
First, though, a grumpy note on the gthumb problem. The bugzilla entry indicates that this crash is the result of being unable to display 3D effects. Now, as far as your editor knows, gthumb has not yet acquired the ability to work with those 3D cameras which are all the rage. The 3D requirement, instead, comes from a desire to show fancy effects in the "slide show" mode. Bling is nice, but if it kills the ability to use the tool for its very two-dimensional intended task, one needs to question the priorities involved.
Unlike gthumb, Shotwell 0.5.2 is entirely happy to run without access to 3D effects. Also unlike gthumb, Shotwell will not just operate on a directory full of images; one must, instead, "import" images into the application. Importing can be done directly from a camera or from a directory. Obnoxiously, the file browser always starts in the user's home directory regardless of where the application was started - and regardless of where the user imported a directory from moments earlier. The importer is not currently able to deal with images in raw formats.
![[Shotwell]](https://static.lwn.net/images/ns/grumpy/shotwell/shotwell-main-sm.png)
After being imported, photos are organized into "events," which are just
the day in which they were taken. The default view is organized around
these events, so the basic mode of interaction is one of a reverse-sorted
timeline of photos. Each event has one "key photo" associated with it
which is shown in the event-level views.
Of course, real events often span more than one day; Shotwell provides the
ability to merge the day-based events into larger groups. There does not
appear to be any way to split an event apart, though. If one photographs a
wedding in the morning, a business meeting after lunch, and a
vuvuzela-inspired bar brawl in the evening, it's all forever a single
event as far as Shotwell is concerned.
Naturally enough, there's support for attaching tags to photos. It's easy enough to quickly add tags to groups of photographs; they can only be removed from a single photo at a time, though. There is no hierarchy to tags, so the list will get long if a lot of tags are used. Tags, like events, are displayed in the left column and are easily selectable.
Shotwell has some simple image editing options, including rotation and cropping. There is a red-eye removal feature as well. The use of it is somewhat awkward; it puts a small circle on the image which the user must position over the eye and size accordingly. It does work, though, and is arguably preferable to the gthumb equivalent, which is sometimes better described as a "red face removal" feature. Shotwell has a small dialog for adjusting parameters like exposure and saturation; there is also an "enhance" button which performs some behind-the-scenes magic, not always to good effect.
The red-eye removal feature exposes one strange gap in Shotwell's feature set: there is no way to zoom in on an image. It's always "fit to window," regardless of what the user might want. This makes the placement of the red-eye tool's circle problematic on anything but a close-up photo.
Users of other image editing tools will likely be looking for a "save as"
option after making some changes, but Shotwell has no such thing. Instead,
all edits are squirreled away in some hidden database. Shotwell does not
![[Shotwell]](https://static.lwn.net/images/ns/grumpy/shotwell/shotwell-single2-sm.png)
change the image itself; it maintains an edit list which is applied on the
fly when the image is displayed. So, once some edits are made, the
original photo is no longer visible in Shotwell unless the user has thought
to create a duplicate prior to making changes. One can always undo changes
to get back to the original once one remembers that changes have
been made. There is no indication in the interface, though, that any
edits have been made. One wonders if the Shotwell developers are
aware of the fact that they are committing themselves to the exact behavior
of all their editing primitives forever; it would be most disturbing to see
pictures change in unpredictable ways after a software upgrade.
One can save out an edited version of an image using the "export" feature. Exporting is also the only time when it is possible to change the resolution of a photograph. It is not possible to change the format an image is stored in. There are also features to "publish" a photo to various proprietary web services; your editor did not test any of those.
For users who simply want a way to collect and organize their photographs, Shotwell may well be developing into a reasonable alternative. For grumpy editors, though, this application seems like the wrong approach. A directory full of photographs is exactly that; there should be no need to "import" it into some application's black box to work with the contents. Any non-trivial photographic workflow involves a number of tools, including raw editors, the Gimp, hugin, etc. Once an image disappears into Shotwell's alternative universe, it becomes unavailable for use with anything else. In other words: in your editor's view, this practice of turning a directory of image files into another, hidden directory of image files breaks the concept of having a box full of useful tools and makes Shotwell unsuitable for real use.
One also must wonder what happens, years from now, when users may want to switch to a newer, shinier application which can cope with the 3D photos they will be taking at that time. How does one transfer thousands of pictures - many with edits hidden in places known only to Shotwell - into that new application? Running "export" on them, one at a time, seems like an unappealing option. Shotwell is free software (it is LGPLv2.1-licensed), so somebody can certainly write a "set my photos free" tool for it. But, to your editor, the need for such a tool just seems wrong.
There is much to be said for innovation in this space; Linux has some nice
photo management and editing software, but it can certainly get better.
But one would hope that this innovation would happen in a way that does not
break the toolbox concept in a domain where toolboxes are highly
appropriate. Shotwell is a young utility; perhaps it will evolve and learn
to play better with others and to avoid locking its users in. Until that
time, it will doubtless be well received by certain classes of users, but
it's certainly not for everybody.