Hello
I’ve been practicing photography as a hobby for more than 15Y under linux with now and my workflow have evolved from basic workflow :
Manual copy from SD
Sorting by hand in folder with “clever” namig scheme (so I could find/grep through my collection to find things)
Editing with GIMP
to my actual workflow
Incremental copy with Shotwell
Sorting through extensive use of hierarchical TAG, flag, reject rating (to mask already edited raws especially if they’re part of a panoramic) in Shotwell
Editing with Darktable and stitching edited with Hugin
Online locally self-hosted gallery with lychee
Along the way I used F-spot photo manager until it was abandoned but I really liked the interface and the timeline statistic that enabled you to restrict the pictures showed to a specific timeframe (like darktable have now)
Why I use Shotwell :
I find the UI simple, not cluttered and straightforward.
The tag search is really really fast and efficient.
Scrolling through your library or search result in mosaic view is really fast as well.
Exporting a selection of pictures (with or without resizing or changing format)
Why I do not use Darktable for this job :
Scrolling your library with my modest computer is really super slow
The interface is not as straightforward when it comes to just library management, but then again the lightable view is doing much more !
What’s not optimal for me in Shotwell :
The startup and some other operations feels kind of slow
On my system at least, it is not color managed !!
It does not have a simple live time restriction to quickly search in a specific time window, the only way I found is to create saved search …
For some time Shotwell does not properly read on import “shot time” of the PNG I export with darktable (which is a pain as I have to reset the dates from Shotwell) but I have to check if it’s a DT export problem or not … just mentioning this in case someone already had to fix this issue
Does anyone have the same observations about Shotwell and what do you use ?
Is there an alternative that would be as streamlined, elegant but at least color managed ? I must confess I’m pretty intimidated by Digikam, the interface does not appeal to me so much and I’d be more inclined to switch to another GTK based UI.
Shotwell is nice and simple. it was designed to have a good user experience. Just google the origins of the project.
Digikam is very powerful, but user experience is next to awful.
I use both:
Shotwell for the last 3 years
Digikam for the previous 20 years.
Sometimes I dip into Digikam to see if I can use it as my daily driver, but I lack the patience.
Unfortunately Shotwell is part time maintained by very few people… basically bc it is written in Vala (which v few people use). It is still an active project, but progress is quite slow. The upside for me has been that it has been very, very stable.
I use Linux Mint Cinnamon and find that this has been the only OS that allows for display profiles to be correctly assigned. No idea why every other OS messes this up. Color wise, I’ve found it to be quite acceptable within Shotwell. if I want to do anything really critical I open in external editor and use GIMP for that.
On Mint there’s also Pix which is close to Shotwell but again lacks some basic functions like star ratings (but does have a nice tagging system). GitHub - linuxmint/pix: Image management application . Still progress there is slow and I prefer Shotwell.
If you are interested, there is Photos on ElementaryOS. It was a fork of Shotwell, and lacks some things like star ratings, but maybe slightly better maintained? I’ve been trying to figure out a way of getting that as a flatpak (because ElementaryOS doesn’t work for me due to lack of color management in the OS settings), but can’t seem to find it.
There’s no other alternative that I can see that is simple to use on any Linux distro. There’s a good opportunity there.
I was pushed by shortcomings unresolved on Shotwell* to try to ciompile elementaryOS photos tonight, unfortunately, one of the library (just one) is not available (geolib-glib 1.0 requiresd, only 2.0 available in gentoo) to succeed in this endeavour.
Flatpak search does not show me any package corresponding, I guess I’ll have to wait for the GTK-4 rewrite to be available !
I’m kind of building up expectations for this software
-*
forced to disable writing tags and metadata to file due to a bug introduced in the 2 latest versions
Import, while scanning for new files, registering files before metadata fully written resulting in shot date ignored when shotwell is running during DT export
Both issues reported, the first one last month and the second one several years ago.
Don’t get me wrong, Shotwell is serving me well even with these hindrances and I’m glad for it ot exist but the possibility to have a shotwell like more actively cared for is quite attractive !
One of the cool things about flatpak is that flatpak-builder abstracts away all the details of the build system. The command to build and install is pretty much the same, just change the name kd the flatpak manifest: Flatpak Builder — Flatpak documentation
