Although I REALLY like the features of KPhotoAlbum, I am about to give up on it because of instability problems. I hear that ShotWell is supposed to be very stable, However, I cannot figure out if it has the key features that I need. I have not been able to figure this out yet from trying the program, nor from what I have been able to find by searching the internet. Perhaps someone on the list could help me.
1. KPhotoAlbum does not make any copies of the photos in its albums. It leaves the images where they are. However, you can invoke an external program to modify a photo (e.g. the GIMP) from within KPhotoAlbum. This is very handy. 2. It is very easy, in KPA to see where the image is located on the hard drive, and to view the full EXIF data, if it exists. Photos can be organized by "date picture taken", which is what I want as edited photos often get their "created" and "modified" dates altered (this is especially troublesome sometimes with Picassa). I could not figure out how to do this easily. In KPA, if you just mouse over an image in the viewer, on the bottom of the window, you can see the full path to the original image. 3. KPA displays RAW images (in my case, .PEF from my Pentax DSLR) 4. A feature which i just discovered in KPA is that, in the viewer, similar images may be "Stacked" and the one on top can be specified. This is especially useful when I have a RAW (.PEF) image which I have edited and saved as a JPEG image. I would normally have the edited .jpg image on top and the .PEF image hidden behind it. You can easily see in the viewer which images are actually stacks, and you can "unstack" any of these to view all the photos in the stack. -- Of somewhat lower priority for me (although in principle, I should be using it), you can tag or categorize images by many different things (which you can define). For example, you can annotate images to define the people it contains, the event, the location, plus any other number of categories. Within a category, you may have unlimited sub-categories. For example, in People, you might have categories for Friends and Family. Then within Family, you could have your parents, and as subcategories your sibings, then their children as subcategories for each of them, etc. Similarly for Places, you could have Continent, Country, Region, City, location within the city etc. Is anything like this available in Shotwell? Another nice feature of KPA is that you can copy a bunch of photos from your hard drive to a CD or DVD (or an external drive or another computer). You can then delete them from your hard drive. The thumbnails and all the annotation information can be retained in your album, along with the location where you have put the images. I have not seen this feature in any other photo organization software. Do you have this? _______________________________________________ Shotwell mailing list [email protected] http://lists.yorba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/shotwell
