Shotwell is a simple yet powerful program that comes installed with most flavors of Fedora, such as Fedora Workstation and the Cinnamon desktop spin. It’s also available for install on any other desktop or spin. You can use it as either a photo viewer and organizer, or an editor.

Viewing and organizing photos with Shotwell

Shotwell works as a simple viewer for various formats, including PNG, JPG, and TIFF. It also organizes photos by either copying files to a database or showing and managing files from the source files. This provides the user with a wide flexibility of options for where they want to import their photos from. You can use it to manage different devices like cameras, phones, and more. Users of Apple computers may find it similar in functionality to iPhoto.

Photos can be organized into events (usually sorted by date) or by custom albums created by the user.

Shotwell as an editor

Shotwell also makes a simple and useful editor, the kind of program that “just works.” You can crop, resize, rotate, and straighten images. You can also automatically enhance and change some elements of your photos like hue and contrast.

If you resize an image and want to re-save it under a new format, it’s easy! Make your adjustments and then use the “Save as” menu option. If you need to adjust the scaling constraints, that’s also possible. You can have Shotwell do it for you automatically or you can manually enter the values you wish to use. Need to correct red-eye? There’s also a tool to make any corrections to some extra shiny eyes at the bottom of the editor mode.

Get Shotwell today

Shotwell is a useful tool for keeping photos organized and making minor edits and corrections to pictures. It’s also a well-designed, intuitive, and lightweight photo-managing program. If you are using Fedora 23 Workstation or some other desktop spins, you might already have it installed. If you don’t see it anywhere, you can install it from the Software application on Workstation.

If you are using another desktop, you can easily install it from the command line. Open a terminal and enter the following command.

$ sudo dnf install shotwell

Confirm the download and you will have Shotwell on your desktop!

In a second part, I will be commenting on other alternate photo viewing or editing programs available in Fedora, such as Gwenview, Gthumb, and GNOME Photos.

Image courtesy Giuseppe Milo – originally posted to Flickr as Newgrange – Co. Meath, Ireland – Travel photography