On the sub-reddit /r/photography, the user /u/cb900crdr made the great suggestion to have a list of programs with links. (Those of you who played with earlier versions of the site may actually remember that I used to have a link for an intended Software page, but didn’t have it filled out yet - so hid it).
Live
The page is live with the list items included at the moment:
So, I wanted to put a page up to specifically list the various fl/oss projects we all might use (and perhaps have a small blurb about each one). I thought I would start a list here and solicit more input from others who might do things I don’t (astrophotography is an example). This is just a quick list off the top of my head:
You may wish to include the Raw editor Lightzone - http://www.lightzoneproject.org/. Includes an Ansel Adams inspired zone mapper. Available for Linux, Mac and Windows.
Two notable misses: Digikam and GPhoto. But they may require a fourth category: “Library Management” even if they include some editing capabilities (as well as Raw processing, at least for Digikam).
In the “Other” section, Blender 3D might be worth mentioning for those looking at doing compositing with 3D Elements, or doing stuff like Match Moving with Photographic Elements.
Rapid Photo Downloader, does what it says, very easy to configure.
Geeqie viewer, a simple but effective viewer.
Fotoxx, an editor and organizer, which has much more features than on first inspection, ideal for someone starting out or as a stepping stone to the more complex softwares.
Thank you for all the suggestions so far, everyone! (Keep them coming if you have more!).
Just a small update - I’m working on the page layout right now for the software page, and working all of these into the list. I’ll update here once the page is live.
I was also poked on twitter about adding some F/OSS gallery/CMS websites to the list. Not quite sure how best to include them, but will consider a separate section perhaps? Something to list all of the various gallery/cms softwares that can be self-hosted or with hosted solutions available.
In the Pixel Editing category one could probably add the VIPS library (http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk), which is one of the fastest and less memory-demanding processing libraries in the FOSS market (and the core of my PhotoFlow editor).
Does VIPS have an interface beyond being a processing library? I knew you used it for the core of PhotoFlow, but I wasn’t sure if there was any way for normal users to make use of it outside of being a lib…
Thanks, great list (I still haven’t dug all the tools).
It’s not easy, for a starter, to choose which tool will be useful.
Open-source, free software is great but, there is a plethora of offer : difficult to evaluate what the tool is for, if it is relevant to me, etc…
Some ideas (in a mess):
New entry : “CLI tools” (imagemagick & co)
Show the activity on the project
pro & cons of each tool (can help when there are several tools for the same task)
???
It’s an important page of the site, because a lot of newcomers (to the site & to FLOSS photography) will start with it.
What do you think about that ?
I love this idea, and will prioritize a way to add a little bit about each project.
CLI tools - This is a good idea, but I fear that there are only really a couple of entries in the entire list that are purely CLI. Maybe it would be better to add a small icon indicating CLI/GUI?
Not sure about how to show activity on the project? As in, commits? Downloads? Not sure…
Pros/Cons of each tool (absolutely).
I am thinking that maybe I can sit down and write either an article or blog post that looks at the basic workflows and software that a user might consider for most tasks (like 80% of photographers might use RAW (darktable/RawTherapee) → Pixel Editing (GIMP) → output. I’d be willing to bet many would just stop at darktable or RT.
Or maybe an article about moving to Free Software from commercial software?
I will ruminate on this a bit for sure and see if we can’t get something a little better together (you’re spot on about the difficulties and newcomers being overwhelmed).
So I’ve taken a preliminary stab at some simple text that describes the most likely workflow for new users. Simply, RAW processing, then possibly pixel editing.
I’m open to further suggestions! I’m thinking I’ll probably start writing one or two sentence descriptions on some of the projects to help people navigate what is what as well.
What about Pinta? (Raster editor). Macrofusion? (Enfuse GUI). There’s also nice image browser with RAW support - Nomacs. For mass convert we can use Converseen and Simple Image Resizer (both with RAW support). Picty is small and nice collection manager, so does Pivot. Photini is great for geotagging.