A quick grumpy review of Shotwell

A quick grumpy review of Shotwell

Idle words from a user to follow.

Have been using f-spot for several Ubuntu releases now. It is kinda-nice and it works fine with external tools, it keeps versions of edited images and its photo repository is a simple directory layout plus a small sqlite database, both are easy to understand. Backing it up or "exporting" photos from it is very simple.

But f-spot crashes every now and then (with no data loss, however) and it appears to slow down with lots of photos. Also, it keeps importing the same image files again and again, even when it is asked to detect duplicates with checksums. That feature hasn't worked properly for a long time.

But here's a plea to anyone implementing image organizer software: Please make it multi-user-capable in some way or another. All current photo organizers seem to expect to store photos on a local disk in one-user mode. This isn't practical when you are, say, married, both love to snap photos and use two laptops and a NAS in the household.

Since a long time, my wife and I are looking for a photo organizer that we can use to work on our shared collection of photos. Right now, the photo collection is on my laptop and my wife needs to login to edit or choose photos.

It would be really nice to have something that we can either use from two computers to work concurrently on photos stored on a network NAS. And / or something that allows to share and edit photos on another computer in the network. I've been looking at web-based photo organizers to put on the NAS, but haven't found one that is as nice as f-spot so far.