A new photo organizer. Well – it’s not brand new, but pretty new. I am not able to get Picasa to work as I want on my Ubuntu 10.04. So, I needed an alternative photo manager. Shotwell entered the field. And do not dismiss this tool by it’s look. The simple GUI is one of the key attractions for me.

Of the fancy features, it has auto grouping by events; the default being by date. You can easily rename these events to your liking.

You also have the basic crop, red-eye and tuning that you expect. It also has a “magic” button – auto enhance which works quite well.

The version I tested was 0.5.0. I upgraded to 0.6.1 by adding their launchpad repository. They have made some changes under the hood. The most significant for me is the importing of folders which lets me choose to link instead of copy the files. It also allows external editors to be launched.

Oh – and did I mention it was fast? It is fast!

Kudos to the developers at yorba!

For more detailed story, see the Gnome journal here.