Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro 2.11 Crack Mac Osx
Carmel Kittell
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June 16, 2010 A Grumpy Editor reviewYour editor routinely does a fair amount of photo editing, typicallypreparing conference pictures for articles or pictures of children forgrandparents. In recent years, xv has become less of a tool of choice; itdid a number of things right that others still haven't figured out, butit's old, dead, not really free, and unmaintained. Much of this work isnow done with gthumb instead. Unfortunately, gthumb has been broken (as in"crashes at start") in Rawhide for quite some time; leaving your editor tolook for alternatives. In this context, the relatively new Shotwell application came to youreditor's attention. Shotwell is said to be replacing F-Spot as the defaultphoto manager in the Ubuntu 10.10 release, so it seems worth a look.First, though, a grumpy note on the gthumb problem. The bugzillaentry indicates that this crash is the result of being unable todisplay 3D effects. Now, as far as your editor knows, gthumb has not yetacquired the ability to work with those 3D cameras which are all the rage.The 3D requirement, instead, comes from a desire to show fancy effects inthe "slide show" mode. Bling is nice, but if it kills the ability to usethe tool for its very two-dimensional intended task, one needs to questionthe priorities involved.Unlike gthumb, Shotwell 0.5.2 is entirely happy to run without access to 3Deffects. Also unlike gthumb, Shotwell will not just operate on a directoryfull of images; one must, instead, "import" images into the application.Importing can be done directly from a camera or from a directory.Obnoxiously, the file browser always starts in the user's home directoryregardless of where the application was started - and regardless of wherethe user imported a directory from moments earlier. The importer is notcurrently able to deal with images in raw formats.After being imported, photos are organized into "events," which are justthe day in which they were taken. The default view is organized aroundthese events, so the basic mode of interaction is one of a reverse-sortedtimeline of photos. Each event has one "key photo" associated with itwhich is shown in the event-level views.Of course, real events often span more than one day; Shotwell provides theability to merge the day-based events into larger groups. There does notappear to be any way to split an event apart, though. If one photographs awedding in the morning, a business meeting after lunch, and avuvuzela-inspired bar brawl in the evening, it's all forever a singleevent as far as Shotwell is concerned.Naturally enough, there's support for attaching tags to photos. It's easyenough to quickly add tags to groups of photographs; they can only beremoved from a single photo at a time, though. There is no hierarchy totags, so the list will get long if a lot of tags are used. Tags, likeevents, are displayed in the left column and are easily selectable.Shotwell has some simple image editing options, including rotation andcropping. There is a red-eye removal feature as well. The use of it issomewhat awkward; it puts a small circle on the image which the user mustposition over the eye and size accordingly. It does work, though, and isarguably preferable to the gthumb equivalent, which is sometimes betterdescribed as a "red face removal" feature. Shotwell has a small dialog foradjusting parameters like exposure and saturation; there is also an"enhance" button which performs some behind-the-scenes magic, not always togood effect.The red-eye removal feature exposes one strange gap in Shotwell's featureset: there is no way to zoom in on an image. It's always "fit to window,"regardless of what the user might want. This makes the placement of thered-eye tool's circle problematic on anything but a close-up photo.Users of other image editing tools will likely be looking for a "save as"option after making some changes, but Shotwell has no such thing. Instead,all edits are squirreled away in some hidden database. Shotwell does notchange the image itself; it maintains an edit list which is applied on thefly when the image is displayed. So, once some edits are made, theoriginal photo is no longer visible in Shotwell unless the user has thoughtto create a duplicate prior to making changes. One can always undo changesto get back to the original once one remembers that changes havebeen made. There is no indication in the interface, though, that anyedits have been made. One wonders if the Shotwell developers areaware of the fact that they are committing themselves to the exact behaviorof all their editing primitives forever; it would be most disturbing to seepictures change in unpredictable ways after a software upgrade.One can save out an edited version of an image using the "export"feature. Exporting is also the only time when it is possible to change theresolution of a photograph. It is not possible to change the format animage is stored in. There are also features to "publish" a photo tovarious proprietary web services; your editor did not test any of those.For users who simply want a way to collect and organize their photographs,Shotwell may well be developing into a reasonable alternative. For grumpyeditors, though, this application seems like the wrong approach. Adirectory full of photographs is exactly that; there should be no need to"import" it into some application's black box to work with the contents.Any non-trivial photographic workflow involves a number of tools, includingraw editors, the Gimp, hugin, etc. Once an image disappears intoShotwell's alternative universe, it becomes unavailable for use withanything else. In other words: in your editor's view, this practice ofturning a directory of image files into another, hidden directory of image files breaks theconcept of having a box full of useful tools and makes Shotwell unsuitablefor real use. One also must wonder what happens, years from now, whenusers may want to switch to a newer, shinier application which can copewith the 3D photos they will be taking at that time. How does one transferthousands of pictures - many with edits hidden in places known only toShotwell - into that new application? Running "export" on them, one at atime, seems like an unappealing option. Shotwell is free software (it isLGPLv2.1-licensed), so somebody can certainly write a "set my photos free"tool for it. But, to your editor, the need for such a tool just seemswrong.There is much to be said for innovation in this space; Linux has some nicephoto management and editing software, but it can certainly get better.But one would hope that this innovation would happen in a way that does notbreak the toolbox concept in a domain where toolboxes are highlyappropriate. Shotwell is a young utility; perhaps it will evolve and learnto play better with others and to avoid locking its users in. Until thattime, it will doubtless be well received by certain classes of users, butit's certainly not for everybody. (Log in to post comments) A quick grumpy review of Shotwell Posted Jun 17, 2010 2:30 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
-No multiple events on a day:
In an event, I select a couple images, I press Ctrl-n (or select menu->new event) and the photos are split off into a new event on the same day. Works fine here.
-Import:
The import dialog *can* copy photos to a folder (I think it proposes the XDG_PICTURES_DIR which is set to "$HOME/Photos" on my box) although I recall that is going to be configurable.
There *is* a checkbox in that import dialog that says "don't copy image" which lets the image rest in place as is (making it useful for other programs). I simply copy my new pictures to a new subdir of my media dir and reimport the whole media dir with the "leave in place" option checked, which will not copy the images to a magic library. It will ignore duplicates that are already imported.
As for the obvious solution: monitoring a dir for new files to appear there is a ticket for that:
-As for zooming, that is annoying, indeed. I never noticed before. Trac tickets seem to indicate it should be there.
Overall I like it because:
- It is fast
- It doesn't get in my old ways of organizing my photos (that is keeping subdirs in a media folder where *I* put them)
- tags and events are useful
- easy integrated flickr upload
- very dynamic development and responsive team of hackers
A quick grumpy review of Shotwell Posted Jun 17, 2010 7:03 UTC (Thu) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]
Have been using f-spot for several Ubuntu releases now. It is kinda-nice and it works fine with external tools, it keeps versions of edited images and its photo repository is a simple directory layout plus a small sqlite database, both are easy to understand. Backing it up or "exporting" photos from it is very simple.But f-spot crashes every now and then (with no data loss, however) and it appears to slow down with lots of photos. Also, it keeps importing the same image files again and again, even when it is asked to detect duplicates with checksums. That feature hasn't worked properly for a long time.But here's a plea to anyone implementing image organizer software: Please make it multi-user-capable in some way or another. All current photo organizers seem to expect to store photos on a local disk in one-user mode. This isn't practical when you are, say, married, both love to snap photos and use two laptops and a NAS in the household.Since a long time, my wife and I are looking for a photo organizer that we can use to work on our shared collection of photos. Right now, the photo collection is on my laptop and my wife needs to login to edit or choose photos.It would be really nice to have something that we can either use from two computers to work concurrently on photos stored on a network NAS. And / or something that allows to share and edit photos on another computer in the network. I've been looking at web-based photo organizers to put on the NAS, but haven't found one that is as nice as f-spot so far. A quick grumpy review of Shotwell Posted Jun 17, 2010 14:00 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]
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