[ubuntu-uk] Getting Shotwell ready for Maverick

[Bruno Girin]

Hi all,

As promised during Wednesday's IRC meeting, here's a quick email for
those of you who are interested in photo management in Ubuntu.

As you may know, the default photo management application in Ubuntu will
change in Maverick. F-Spot is out, Shotwell is in. Shotwell is developed
by a non-profit foundation called Yorba and they are very keen to see it
make a good debut in Ubuntu. To this effect, they have moved forward
their release date for version 0.7 in order to deliver in time for
Maverick, including some of the most important features in the Ubuntu
blueprint [1].

I found myself, quite by accident, involved in fixing defects in
Shotwell and I'm now in the process of delivering one of the essential
features for Ubuntu users: the ability to migrate from F-Spot. So if you
feel adventurous and want to see what it looks like, I suggest you get
the source and compile from trunk. It's a lot easier than it sounds and
all the explanations are on the Yorba site [2]. Don't forget to also
build libraw and gexiv2.

If you feel even more adventurous and want to see what the upcoming
import from F-Spot feature looks like, I uploaded a patch for it
yesterday that is still a bit rough round the edges but does what it
says on the tin (at least on my machine). To install it, go to the page
for defect 139 [3], download the file called shotwell-bug-139.4.diff and
apply the patch at the top of the Shotwell directory structure and
recompile:

patch -p0 < shotwell-bug-139.4.diff

This will then add a new File -> Import From F-Spot menu item. The code
is able to find existing F-Spot databases in know locations but will
also let you specify your own database file. If you find any bug, I'd be
more than interested in hearing about it!

Happy hacking,

Bruno

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/shotwell
[2] http://yorba.org/shotwell/install/
[3] http://trac.yorba.org/ticket/139