I am beginning the process of transitioning to Linux from Mac (I have chosen Ubuntu). I am looking for a good DAM software to replace Lightroom and have been assessing Shotwell. Is it still under active development? It appears to be under gnome now. I ask because I have downloaded but there any appears to be some major bugs with very fundamental things. For example, it crashes when importing, it stores raw and jpeg as a pair, but I can’t seem to access the jpeg (consequently browsing images is horrific as it takes multiple seconds to view one image).
I’m looking for just a simple DAM that can organize my jpeg and raw files in a library (and ideally manage as a pair), have ability to rate, keyword, create collections, import from memory card etc. I will do raw edits in rawtherapee probably.
One of my main goals is simplicity of experience, fast browsing. The priority here is good DAM, not a do it all system that is horrible to use. I enjoyed Picasa for that reason. I have been shooting for 20 years, so quite the collection has been created.
Shotwell seems to fit the bill, but I can’t tell if anyone is still supporting it? if they are, where do I find developer forums for contribution? Or any pointers, or recommendations for other software?
I tried gthumb but is quite limited
I tried digikam but the user experience is horrifying to me.
I tried darktable, but I also dislike the experience.
Out of curiosity, what functionality do you expect out of “collections”? Because I’m going to eventually add this functionality to Filmulator, and honestly I don’t know what exactly people would want out of such a feature.
Maybe I should find a better home. Something that has frustrated me with being on commercial software is the thrashing I do when a product becomes discontinued and I have to switch. That’s mostly a problem for DAM software as moving is a lot of effort.
I’d like a simple DAM that ideally is just open source, has a long term development support, and doesn’t require me to keep switching.
Y’might look at geeqie. It has a collection feature that might scratch your itch…
@carvac, My thinking about how a collection would work would be a list of file paths to renditions scattered around my central photo directory hierarchy. The software could take such a list and display it like the contents of any directory, with all the available operations, 'cept maybe ‘move’. That’s how I’d keep track of my portfolio, for instance…
Could you elaborate on what the use case for nested collections is? To organize the collections themselves, or to view all member photographs? Do you need collections to be able to contain both images and other collections, or is it okay for meta-collections to not directly contain images?
Is there a point to having a dynamic collection beyond just remembering the filter parameters? Or is this something used specifically in concert with meta-collections?
@ggbutcher Filmulator hides away the notion of directories, instead keeping everything in a database generally accessed purely chronologically. I haven’t yet enabled multiple renditions of the same file, but I’ve accounted for it in the database design to some extent.
I haven’t bothered with collections or tags yet because chronological order with the date histogram has been good enough thus far for my purposes.
So I got introduced to Shotwell when playing around with Elementary OS a few years ago.
Has the elementary team taken a fork of Shotwell and are continuing to develop? If so how do I get hold of that program without having to resort to installing elementary OS?
I really like the idea of simple programs, with nice UIs that are fast, and robust.
While I don’t personally have a need for a collections feature, I was unaware that Geeqie (which I use and like) had such a feature. You learn something every day here!
I headed over to my daughter’s computer, which is running Elementary OS Hera (based on Ubuntu 18) .
Two things I noticed:
the OS was far more snappy than what I was seeing to my Ubuntu Budgie '20 release. That computer has a quad core Intel, 2.6ghz 8gb ram My computer is an old mac pro 2009 with 8 cores, 2ghz 12gb ram. I would at least expect similar performance, but it elementary was noticeably faster, like a 386 to Pentium jump in performance.
I loaded some test images into Photos (variant of Shotwell) and found it to be a lot more usable than Shotwell. When looking at ‘stacked’ raw and jpeg pairs, the raw image is featured and it displays the jpeg rendering, which I guess is the one built in to the image. The speed of showing the image was almost instant. It also appeared to be more robust and wasn’t crashing on import, and I was able to browse images while I was doing that. Shotwell is terribly instable.
So I threw in the towel and given I’m still just sandboxing linux on an old hard drive I just went ahead and installed Elementary OS 5 on my computer.
So far quite impressed with Elementary Photos. It is quite good, but lacks collections and there’s no way of teasing apart the jpeg and raw file. Otherwise quite good.
My quest for a good open source DAM continues, but Elementary Photos is closer.
