Shotwell is a free image viewer and organizer which is part of the GNOME desktop environment, this application is written in the Vala programming language. Shotwell has replaced F-Spot as the default image viewer on several Linux distributions.
Also you can import photos using libgphoto2 library similar to other organizers like F-Spot and gThumb. You can also import directly from a digital camera. Shotwell automatically groups photos by date and supports tagging.
Their Image editing features allow users to rotate, crop, remove red-eye, and adjust levels and color balance.
It also has an "automatic adjustment" that tries to find the right levels for the image. Shotwell allows users to post their images to Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa Web Albums.
In addition, has support for RAW photos and videos and it also allows you to view photos in full screen mode.
New version of Shotwell
Recently the availability of a new version of Shotwell was announced, reaching its new version 0.29.3 in which this new release introduces several improvements, especially for the user interface (UI) side. The developers have worked hard to improve the stability of the software.
But from between the changes and improvements it has received the app the feature that makes this release noteworthy is the return of the facial recognition or face detection function on the main branch.
This feature allows us to better manage and organize photos. Face detection was already developed in the past, to be precise in 2012, during the Google Summer of Code event. It was dropped shortly after and has not returned to the main branch to this day.
Now, with the code now back on the main branch, it appears that the Shotwell developers have a lot of work to do to resolve the outstanding issues that come with the return of this feature that uses OpenCV to power its face detection capabilities.
Between the other characteristics that we can highlight of this release we can find:
- Move extended properties to a sidebar
- A fix for the slideshow settings dialog
- Introduction to Flatpak Support
- Fix download of OAuth2 token from Google login
How to install Shotwell 0.29.3 on Ubuntu 18.04 and derivatives?
Moment this new version of Shotwell 0.29.3 is considered an unstable version, On the other hand, they still have a lot of work to do with the face detection function.
These types of unstable versions of Shotwell are not recommended for most users as they may contain bugs, regressions, or broken resources.
So that if you want you can get the source code of this new version of Shotwell which you can download from this link.
There is also a repository that is maintained by the software developer, Jens Georg. But I must tell you that this is only from unstable versions of the program.
At the moment the developer has not yet updated the version, but I do not doubt that in a few days it will be available in its repository. But if you still want to try this new version to know the changes you can add this repository to your system.
For this we must open a terminal and execute the following commands.
We add the repository with:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yg-jensge/shotwell-unstable
We update the list of packages and repositories with:
sudo apt-get update
And finally we update our application with:
sudo apt dist-upgrade
As I am telling you for now, you only have to wait for this new version to be available.
How to uninstall Shotwell 0.29.3 on Ubuntu 18.04 and derivatives?
If you installed this version and had problems and want to go back to the stable version. You must do the following.
First we must open a terminal and execute:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yg-jensge/shotwell-unstable -r -y sudo apt-get remove shotwell --auto-remove
We add the repository of the stable version
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yg-jensge/shotwell sudo apt-get update
And we install again with:
sudo apt-get install shotwell