Shotwell 0.32.0 arrives with support improvements, recognition and more

After four and a half years of development, the release of the first version of a new stable branch of Shotwell 0.32.0, version that comes with great compatibility improvements, features and more.

For those who don't know about Shotwell, they should know that this is a photo collection management software which provides convenient cataloging and browsing through the collection, supports grouping by time and tags, provides tools for importing and converting new photos, supports performing typical image processing operations, etc.

Main news of Shotwell 0.32.0

In this new version of Shotwell 0.32.0 that is presented, it stands out that support for JPEG XL, WEBP and AVIF image formats (AV1 Image Format), as well as HEIF (HEVC), AVIF, MXF and CR3 (Canon raw format) file formats.

Another change that stands out is that by default, face recognition in the photos and the configuration of Tags to fit faces are enabled. Tags like these can be used to group, sort, and find people in other photos.

The interface for viewing photos and the tools for processing them are adapted to work on screens with a high pixel density (HiDPI).

In addition to that, Shotwell 0.32.0 also highlights the improved support for Flickr, Google Photos and Piwigo, as well as that the loading of photos in Google Photos in batch mode was improved. Removed Facebook post code (was inoperable).

On the other hand, we can find in Shotwell 0.32.0 that provides the ability to specify hierarchical labels which consist of several levels (eg "group/tag"), plus the libportal library is used to send photos and set wallpapers from sandboxes (eg when installing a flatpak package).

Of the other changes that stand out from the new version:

• Added the ability to use multiple accounts for each external photo service (only works for Piwigo for now).
• Added support for profiles and interface to create/edit profiles.
• When importing files from directories, .nomedia file processing is implemented, allowing you to selectively disable content scanning.
• Added the haarcascade profile to use the eponymous object recognition algorithm on photographs.
• Improved image handling with GPS metadata.
• Added support for exporting GPS metadata.
  Improved zoom control and touchpad scrolling.
• The libsecret library is used to store connection parameters for external services. Redesigned implementation of OAuth1.
• Implemented a new panel to configure plugins.
• Faster navigation through directories with a large number of files. Raw image reading was sped up.
• The source texts have been rearranged.
• Improved dialog for editing previous searches.
• Added command line option -p/–show-metadata to display image metadata.
• The attached comment size has been increased to 4KB.

How to install Shotwell on Ubuntu and derivatives?

At the moment the application has not been updated within the Ubuntu repositories, but it will soon be available. But if you still want to test this new version to see the changes, you can compile the package yourself. You can get the source code of this new version of Shotwell which you can download from this link.

Or, if you prefer, you can run the following commands to compile:

meson build
ninja -C build install

As I am telling you for now, you only have to wait for this new version to be available.

How to uninstall Shotwell on Ubuntu and derivatives?

If you installed this version and had problems and want to go back to the previous version. You must do the following.

First we must open a terminal and execute:

 sudo apt-get remove shotwell --auto-remove

And we install again with:

sudo apt-get install shotwell