A look at the Fotoxx image editor

Note: several of the project sites linked to below are temporarily offline, evidently due to a storage fault incident at SourceForge. Hopefully they will be back online shortly.

Image editing, like a great many tasks, tends to be dominated at any one time by a small handful of applications. For example, at the moment, the most popular programs for editing photos are probably GIMP, darktable, digiKam, and RawTherapee. A few years ago, the list might have included Rawstudio, F-Spot, Geeqie, and gThumb. Tastes change; individual projects gain and lose steam, and what counts as state-of-the-art technology shifts over time. Nevertheless, at any given time, most of the current crop of applications tend to adhere to the same general approach where user-interface and interaction decisions are concerned. So it is all the more intriguing to encounter a project like Fotoxx, an image editor that takes its own approach. The latest release recently became available, and offers an interesting editing experience.

Fotoxx has been in development since mid-2008. The latest release, version 15.07, was unveiled in early July. Packages are available in Debian format and there are the requisite source-code bundles for other distributions. The only external dependency that might cause some trouble is the raw-photo processing package UFRaw. UFRaw is most often used as a plug-in for GIMP, so it might need to be installed for users who favor some other raw processor.

In some respects, Fotoxx is a standard image-editing tool. It lets the user index their image collection (in place, so images are not needlessly duplicated), browse and search through it, and perform a wealth of corrections and transformations on individual images or in batches.

What makes Fotoxx distinct, though, is its atypical user interface, which has seemingly evolved over the years along a path completely different from that of its contemporaries. Fotoxx uses GTK+ as its GUI toolkit, but it does not sport a tool palette or control panels that resemble any of those used by GIMP, darktable, and the like. In fact, it eschews any number of standard GTK+ practices—such as having a menu bar at the top of the window.

Instead, there is a single strip of buttons down the left-hand side of the application window. Clicking on a button pops up a floating text menu of available features, and almost all of the features open their own pop-up windows filled primarily with text-labeled buttons rather than graphics. For some tools, this is not a big change. Adjusting the hue of the image, for example, requires only a few sliders: the effects of moving those sliders are visible immediately on the image, so no other UI elements are required.

For other tools, the text-label approach is more challenging. The paint/clone tool, for instance, uses text labels to indicate the radius and transparency level of the paintbrush. GIMP's approach is clearer, simply showing a circle of the appropriate size and opacity. The text-driven UI is also interesting because it has some absolute limits: there are some controls where only a graph will do, such as adjusting brightness or tone curves. For those tools, Fotoxx displays a graph.

The other manner in which the Fotoxx UI differs from its contemporaries is that almost all of the pop-up windows it uses to provide features are modal. That is, they sit on top of the main image window and take control of the interface; until you are done with one tool or filter and close its window, you cannot open a different tool. This design decision leads to some interesting side-effects—such as a tendency toward a step-by-step, linear processes to perform editing tasks, as opposed to image tools that you can open up and fiddle with haphazardly.

Some of the standard editing features certainly suffer as a result. When selecting part of an image, Fotoxx pops up a window filled with checkboxes and text buttons that correspond to the various selection modes (drawing boxes, drawing freehand lines, select-by-color, and so on). You can construct your selection area by alternating between the tools available, drawing individual selection regions that appear on the image as red outlines. When you are done, you click on the "Finish" button, then must individually click in each zone of the image to activate the selection. When selecting complex or compound shapes, this becomes tedious quickly.

On the other hand, some features benefit from the approach. For example, the perspective-correction tool is among the simplest of any image editor. You merely click on four points in the image (in any order), then click "Apply" to transform the image so that the quadrilateral you have chosen becomes a proper rectangle. The corresponding GIMP tool uses a floating grid rendered on top of a preview image—which can be difficult to see through and unresponsive to manipulate.

Apart from the novel user interface (which can certainly be deemed a plus or a minus, depending on the individual user's inclinations), Fotoxx excels in the areas of speed and simplicity. Image operations are fast and, importantly, that speed includes showing an immediate preview of the effect in question on the open image. Many of GIMP's effects, by comparison, provide only a thumbnail-sized preview of their output. That can inadvertently add time as you adjust the settings and sliders, then must pan and zoom around the thumbnail preview to see if your changes produce the desired outcome.

Naturally, simplicity is a double-edged sword. Darktable and GIMP (especially GIMP combined with the G'MIC plugin) offer a dizzying array of filters and effects. For simple editing of photos that do not suffer from major defects, darktable and GIMP can be on the sluggish side. Applications that focus on "image-collection management" (such as digiKam and GNOME Photos) generally offer quick-adjustment features, but those applications also have a tendency to try taking over one's image collection even when not asked—scanning your home directory and firing up databases and indexing processes.

Fotoxx fills in nicely for these situations. It does not try to force you into indexing your complete photo archive (or, worse yet, copying it to the application's preferred location), but it provides access to color and tone adjustments, sharpness and noise filters, and standard retouching tools. And, if the adjustments needed do go beyond what Fotoxx itself can handle, the application allows you to open the image in GIMP by clicking on the "Tools" -> "Plugins" -> "GIMP" option.

This is not to say that Fotoxx is lacking in powerful features. Recent releases have added a "World Maps" feature that lets you view all of your geotagged images on a global, zoomable map. There is also support for some specialty image-editing operations like exposure stacking (which is used, for example, to combine multiple dim astrophotography images into a single photo) and panorama stitching. Such specialized features, though, tend to require the user to make a large time investment both behind the camera and in front of the keyboard, so comparing them to the competition (e.g., Hugin) objectively can be difficult.

For everyday editing, however, Fotoxx is well worth keeping around. Its peculiar interface may occasionally cause some frustration, but it also prompts some "why haven't other projects thought of that?" moments.