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Ubuntu Replaces F-Spot With Shotwell 361

Posted by timothy from the such-pretty-pictures dept.
climenole writes "Finally! The much discussed F-Spot vs. Shotwell battle is over. The new default image organizer app for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 is going to be Shotwell. This is a much-needed change; F-Spot was simply not enough. Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me. Shotwell on the other hand feels a lot more solid and is better integrated with the GNOME desktop. Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono."
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Ubuntu Replaces F-Spot With Shotwell More

Ubuntu Replaces F-Spot With Shotwell

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  • um who cares? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13, 2010 @08:45PM (#32560418)

    So the summary is just copy/paste from some blog.
    Gnome made the change, not Ubuntu.
    That version of Shotwell has been out for well over a month.

    This is not news, for nerds or for anyone.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Yfrwlf ( 998822 )
      It's news for Ubuntu users, which comprises probably most Linux users, so it is relevant and is news for them, just as major Fedora changes are news-worthy as well but less so since Fedora is less used, at least for desktops I would argue, but who knows, maybe it's equal or more, that's besides the point that they are both news worthy IMO.

      Ubuntu bashing is amusing, but pretty infantile. Fedora uses pretty much the same programs, with a different non-universal package manager, just as DEB isn't universal

  • On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by greg_barton ( 5551 ) <greg_barton&yahoo,com> on Sunday June 13, 2010 @08:46PM (#32560420) Homepage Journal

    Shotwell on a other hand...

    For fuck sake, editors.

    EDIT!

  • If someone integrates F-spot into gnome..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 13, 2010 @08:48PM (#32560436)

    Shouldn't it then be named G-spot? If a program of such a name were to exist, would any male users be able to find it, let alone use it?

  • Stupid remarks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by akanouras ( 1431981 ) on Sunday June 13, 2010 @08:57PM (#32560476)

    Most of the times when I tried F-Spot, it just keeps crashing on me.

    Do we need such silly commentary?

    I'm using Kubuntu btw, so I couldn't care less about F-Spot.

  • Shotwell is also completely devoid of Mono.

    I take issue with this last line. I LIKE c#/.net. If I get to use it in more places, this is a good thing.

    Isn't the whole shtick about open source the fact that we get more options?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ie2fleen ( 746200 )
      We all know that Mono is the cause of F-Shot's stability issues...right?

    • Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slimjim8094 ( 941042 ) on Sunday June 13, 2010 @09:18PM (#32560604)

      The concern is not so much about the language itself as with Microsoft. They've *said* they won't sue anyone using/writing for Mono, but since they've threatened to do some very similar things and I'm not so sure I trust them.

      In any case, the intensity with which Icaza has been pushing Mono, plus his ties with Microsoft, scare the crap out of me.

      So please, feel free to develop with it. But I'm not so sure I'll be installing Mono to run your app, because I try to keep it off otherwise.

      • There are a few developers who I feel indebted to. Icaza is one. I use Midnight Commander every day. I give these developers "the benefit of the doubt". Icaza is up there with Bram Moolenaar (VIM). VIM is more important, but MC also "gets it done". And has for almost 15 years.

        So, when Icaza said "Mono is important", I tried to suspend my disbelief. And, it was difficult for me; the JVM also had a 15 year history for me.

        I'm STILL trying to see it. I "dutifully" installed Moonlight into Firefox. I've tried F-Spot. But, there appears to be no broad-base support for the CLR, even now. No CLR support for Unix... To quote a Microsoft MVP

        "Shinma,

        I would not recommend trying to run .NET on a unix platform. While
        there are attempts (there is a CLR based on a source project released by MS
        named ROTOR, and there is also the MONO project), not all of the
        functionality is there.

        What are you trying to do? Which parts of the framework do you want to
        leverage? I think that there might be an ASP.NET implementation up and
        running.

        --
        - Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]"

        Now, MONO claims to have Solaris support, but I haven't yet tried it (can you get support for this from Novell?) And what about AIX and HP-UX?

        JAVA supports these platforms, and so appears to be a more universal delivery system.

        Was Icaza wrong? Maybe. It is possible that the CLR offers features that are not possible with the JVM (I don't know, the only thing I have personally done in this space is a COBOL to JVM system, and I haven't ever really looked at CLR -- after all Alchemy offers a commercial COBOL to CLR compiler already).

        Now, I have never stressed F-Spot, but what I did try appeared to work just fine. I'm all for competition, and if the CLR is superior to the JVM, let it win! I just don't understand why it hasn't been pushed into the Unix space. Are IBM, HP and Oracle wrong?

        Just curious on the thoughts of some fellow developers here. Especially from those companies. Some insight would be valuable.

        Thanks, Ratboy666

        • VIM is more important [than mc]

          Woooow. Understatement of the century.

          You know come to think of it, I don't htink I've ever met a single person that uses mc, everyone either uses real GUIs, or real CLI tools...

          Also, Icaza is a certifiable jackass. He wasn't so bad in the beginning, but his trollish behaviour concerning the entire mono situation is just too much.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by shutdown -p now ( 807394 )

          I'm all for competition, and if the CLR is superior to the JVM, let it win! I just don't understand why it hasn't been pushed into the Unix space. Are IBM, HP and Oracle wrong?

          No, they just don't want to embrace a competing technology, especially the one where design choices are by and large made by said competitor.

          And Microsoft isn't exactly interested in providing first-class CLR experience on Unix for obvious reasons.

          So you end up with Mono, which is largely volunteer-driven. Of course that is going to lag behind a major commercial project such as Sun JVM.

    • Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Abcd1234 ( 188840 ) on Sunday June 13, 2010 @09:22PM (#32560628) Homepage

      Meh, as long as F-Spot and Mono remain in the repository, I have little issue with them moving to Shotwell if they feel it's the better product (for whatever reason, be it phantom legal issues, or legitimate stability issues).

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Boltronics ( 180064 )

      The real issue is with patents. Stallman wrote about this last year.
      http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono [fsf.org]

      Similar to WINE in a way, it's good to have an open source project to allow us to run more software. However, that doesn't mean that software developers should make their applications depend on them when specifically targeting a GNU/Linux environment - it's an unnecessary risk.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by A beautiful mind ( 821714 )

      I take issue with this last line. I LIKE c#/.net. If I get to use it in more places, this is a good thing.

      Isn't the whole shtick about open source the fact that we get more options?

      Open source is about options, true. So you're saying that Mono should be included as a required dependency in the base system of Ubuntu because you like it, but fuck all the people who don't like Mono for various reasons? This clearly isn't about more options. Leaving Mono "optional" is about more options.

    • Re:Isn't it all about options? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jmorris42 ( 1458 ) * <jmorris@[ ]u.org ['bea' in gap]> on Sunday June 13, 2010 @09:42PM (#32560718)

      > I LIKE c#/.net.

      Someone always pops up saying something like this anytime Mono is mentioned. But if C#/.Net/Mono is so great why hasn't anything really great been created with it in all the years it has existed? Remember when Microsoft was going to recode pretty much all of their userland? yea right. Reminds me of when belief in the Java hype pushed Corel under as they thought they could write a cross platform office suite with it. So show me something Mono/.Net based that that is awesome and where the choice of platform was something more a technical than a political/religious decision.

      But beyond that, the fact is we are talking about a technology controlled by Microsoft. Many people simply do not trust them, and for good reason. So using Mono to allow otherwise foreign code to run is unobjectionable. Creating core subsystems of the Free Software/Open Source environment isn't. Any distribution that breaks if Mono is removed is going to be unacceptable to a large enough subset of users that it simply isn't likely to happen in any of the top ten distros.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chgros ( 690878 )

      While I haven't used C#, from what I've heard it's vastly superior to Java; so I understand if you like it.
      However, still from what I've heard, mono is a very poor implementation of .Net. For instance, the VM uses a GC designed for C, and apparently the library is not written especially carefully.

  • Curing Mono (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Improv ( 2467 ) <pgunn01@gmail.com> on Sunday June 13, 2010 @09:28PM (#32560650) Homepage Journal

    I'm always glad to hear about mono being used less on Linux.

    • I believe there is a cream that can help.

    • Re:Curing Mono (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Seth Kriticos ( 1227934 ) on Sunday June 13, 2010 @10:57PM (#32561060)

      Yup. The first thing I usually do when installing Ubuntu now a days is:

      sudo aptitude purge mono-gac libmono2.0-cil -y

      This also removes F-Spot, Tomboy and Gbrainy, none of which I particularly miss.

  • Gqview (Score:3, Informative)

    by phrostie ( 121428 ) on Sunday June 13, 2010 @09:34PM (#32560686)

    or what ever they call it now

  • Shotwell is beta (Score:5, Insightful)

    by EEPROMS ( 889169 ) on Sunday June 13, 2010 @10:11PM (#32560870)
    As much as I like having one less set of libs to install I have to say shotwell is way behind F-Spot on the usability front. I would say Shotwell needs another year to mature before it gets even near what F-spot is "now". Ubuntu is a key representation of Linux on the desktop and if users have to deal with a very beta experience of shotwell I dare say it wont reflect positively on Linux as a whole (I personally prefer Digikam over F-Spot).

    • Re:Shotwell is beta (Score:4, Insightful)

      by datakid23 ( 1706976 ) on Sunday June 13, 2010 @11:39PM (#32561240)
      +1 for digiKam over either F-spot or Shotwell - one of the first things I do on a new machine for the relatives is to install digikam.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And in that vein, why doesn't Ubuntu go back to gThumb? That was the default camera app till 8.04 Hardy. F-Spot as introduced was comparatively bloated, crash-happy, and didn't respect the directory structure so many of us already had our pictures in. The switch to F-Spot didn't make sense then, and I'm not surprised it's being dropped now, but why Shotwell-beta over going back to gThumb?

      Like, is it personal? Or are there actual feature reasons for avoiding gThumb that I've managed to miss?

      • gthumb (Score:5, Interesting)

        by roalt ( 534265 ) <slashdot.org@roa l t . com> on Monday June 14, 2010 @03:02AM (#32562154) Homepage Journal
        I've been following developments of gthumb lately and I've seem a significant increase in improvements the last year. I'm pretty sure it's triggered by competition with F-Spot and possibly Shotwell. The main reason for me to use gthumb is the superior import facility for your digital photos. You can store them in your own hierarchy/folders in the way you like it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by timbo234 ( 833667 )

      Why try to re-invent the wheel at all with Shotwell, what's wrong with digikam? The disk space required for KDE libs is insignificant on modern computers (especially compared to the size of the average person's photo collection).

      Is it the irrational fear that non-technical people will be confused by a GUI interface that looks slightly different? Because that's what they get in Windows all the time and they seem to cope.

  • Features (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lahvak ( 69490 ) on Sunday June 13, 2010 @10:28PM (#32560940) Homepage Journal

    I have never heard about shotwell, so I went to its website (it would be nice if the article actually included a link to that). As far as I can tell, there are some important features missing from shotwell. Namely, there is no information about raw, integration with ufraw or another raw developing software, editing photos in external editors (GIMP), or running external filters on photos.

    Also, it does not seem to have as many export options as f-spot.

    I am definitely not happy with f-spot, and always keep looking for a replacement, but so far I was unable to find one, and, as far as I can tell, shotwell with its current set of features is not going work for me.

    • I too am unhappy with F-Spot. It seems to always be the most awkward place in my workflows, no matter what I am doing with the images.

      But it sounds like shotwell would be moving in the wrong direction.

      Anyone here familiar with F-Spot's performance wrt upgrades? Can we expect improvements in F-Spot at a steady pace, or is it a moribund project? I'm thinking that the next version of F-Spot might be closer to what would make me happy (Could we get a Linux version of IrfanView? I don't suppose IrfanView wou

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by QBasicer ( 781745 )
        I just had a look inside their git news (http://git.gnome.org/browse/f-spot/tree/NEWS) and saw:

        f-spot 0.7.0 - Jun 16 2010 - Full Steam Ahead!

        • First release of the unstable 0.7 development series. Massive changes.
        • Reparenting and detaching support
        • A new Mallard-based documentation
        • No longer embeds flickrnet, uses distribution copy
        • Adoption of a large amount of Hyena functionality
        • No longer embeds gnome-keyring-sharp
        • Completely rewritten import, much faster and less memory hungry
        • No longer use gphoto2-sharp, now uses gvfs which is less crash-pron [SIC]
        • Fix Facebook support
        • Modernized unit tests
        • Revamped build
        • Much improved duplicate detection (much faster too)
        • Mouse selection in Iconview
        • Image panning support using middle mouse button
        • Timeline slider now restricted to the size of the window
        • Over 90 bugs closed

        So it looks promising in the short term. Perhaps there's been a bit of pressure on them? Too little too late?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by JanneM ( 7445 )

      There also seems to be no support for hierarchical tags or for having many tags in general, just a linear dump of all tags you've got. Not so much fun when you have tags in the many hundreds, and when you want one tag to actually generate two or more tags in the final taglist.

      And little to no support for having multiple versions of an image; the only thing seems to be this: "Shotwell stores your edits in a database and applies them on the fly as necessary.". Which is great fun, I guess, if your original ima

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lahvak ( 69490 )

        That's true, F-spot (or mono) has been much more stable lately, I still have an occasional crash every once a while, but I didn't have one in which I would loose any work or data in at least a year. A light table mode would be great, one where you can see several versions of a photo, zoom and pan them simultaneously, etc.

        The feature I would most welcome a possibility to filter a photo through an external command, and read the result in as a new version. I often find myself exporting photo to a folder, ope

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by JanneM ( 7445 )

          That's one thing that could be improved I agree. What I do is edit the image in whatever way I wanted to. Then I go to "Photo->New Version" to make a new copy of the image, right-click on the image and copy the place (the qualified filename) and then, in a terminal simply copy the edited one I made to the new version.

          One thing that could help (apart from making a simpler plugin interface) would be to be able to simply tell F-spot that "this image is actually just a version of that one". Could be as easy

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arose ( 644256 )

      As far as I can tell, there are some important features missing from shotwell.

      Like f-spot's killer feature, fucking with timestamps.

      Namely, there is no information about raw

      Will be in the next stable, works great in the development version.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by devent ( 1627873 )
      Try Gwenview. It have all kinds of exports, batch processing, tools, crop, resize, red eyes removal and perhaps more.

  • Good, I hated F-Spot (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kuriharu ( 756937 )
    F-spot makes duplicates of my photos. Good riddance! One copy of each pic is enough, thank you!

    • F-spot makes duplicates of my photos. Good riddance!

      The version in lucid doesn't seem to do that any more whereas Shotwell does this. So it's not "good riddance". They finally fixed the problem only to bring it back again in a different photo manager..

  • Yet another application rewritten in Gnome... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Per Cederberg ( 680752 ) on Sunday June 13, 2010 @11:48PM (#32561266)
    As long as developers keep rewriting apps from scratch every 2-3 years, they'll never become truly stable or usable. And they won't progress much beyond tech demos or the basic feature checklists.

    When will we see true progress in integration, usability or features?

    • Amarok, Rhythmbox, and Firefox all seem to be coming along nicely (but you know they'll replace Firefox with Epiphany and Rhythmbox with something else sooner or later). The problem is very obvious: Gnome is suffering from creeping elegance, and noone will admit it.

      • This is the single biggest failing of the FOSS ecosystem.

        Someone starts a piece of software and gets some of the desired features working. Shortly after that, someone else, either working on the project or using it, decides one of several problems plague the program. Either it's development is too slow, it has crummy architecture, someone else thinks they can do better, philosophically or technically, or they are half-baked programmers who look at existing code, can't figure it out, and decide to start over from scratch. Or maybe the project's lead(s) decide that their way of doing things, technically or philosophically, is the only "right" way, and hit would-be contributors over the head with attitude (I'm looking at for example developers of VLC and cdparanoia, not to mention the issue of Linux kernel schedulers and sound subsystem).

        So we end up with multiple half-baked programs all doing sort of the same thing in different ways but none of them doing the whole job. Naturally, when someone sees the situation, the first reaction is "All this mess! I'm going to start a NEW project and do it RIGHT this time!"

        If we FOSS users and developers are lucky, eventually there will be a tipping point when a majority gravitate to one project and things get more or less sorted out. If not, well, we can always use ANOTHER, say, media player; some college CS major can tackle it as a senior project, release it, and then forget all about it. If Amarok, Audacious, Beep, BMPx, Banshee, Kaffeine, Miro, Rhythmbox, VLC, Winamp, XMMS, xine and whatever else I'm forgetting don't offer enough choice for you.

        Glad to see that yet another category of software is joining the party.

  • Wrong criteria (Score:3, Insightful)

    by frisket ( 149522 ) <peter@ s i l m a r i l . ie> on Monday June 14, 2010 @03:56AM (#32562386) Homepage
    Who gives a tinker's spit about "managing" your "photos"? I want to edit images, so I'll install GIMP and set all the filetypes back where they belong. Iff I connect my camera, then perhaps I want to invoke something to offload selected pix and file them by date. F-Spot was about as useful as a wet paper bag at managing photos, with an incomprehensible interface and no editing.

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