app review: shotwell photo manager

after initial disappointment with photo managers in ubuntu, i finally found something which suits me and i love it. shotwell photo manager, the default application which comes with ubuntu. last time, i missed it as i couldn't make it scan my photos in hdd and hence i uninstalled it.

i was searching for my requirements, like being able to upload photos directly to available online services and do a little editing along with managing my photos. in preferences, i had to check "watch library directory for new files" and just like that, it scanned my photos.

also, it identifies and categorizes photos based on the date and time it was taken (interesting idea) as it's able to probably guess an event of which you took photos of. that's why it's 'shotwell' photo manager.

this is what my event screen looks like. the image editing capabilities are very basic. however, you can easily configure this to launch your images in gimp whenever you want to edit them. the basic toolbar for editing looks like this.

also supports cropping and publishing photos to online services like your picasaweb albums or your flickr account or maybe your favorite facebook album ;)

publishing is quite easy as your just have to go to file menu -> publish and then this small wizard would come up and you can simply re-size photos and publish easily to your web.

just minor things which it doesn't do at this moment.
1. gesture based scrolling between photographs.
2. a little bit more of editing like applying templates and frames.\
3. photo collection backup management.

anyhow, since it connects seamlessly with other softwares, i really love this now. i'll update when i stop using this, but for now, it's my place of organizing and handling all photos that i click.