Out of a mojito bar in South Beach with a lobotomised plastic picnic spoon and a crew of control freaks.

3.22 is here

We recently released GNOME 3.22. It will be in Fedora Workstation 25. Go look at the video — it’s awesome!

GNOME Photos has again taken significant strides forward – just like we did six months ago in 3.20. One of the big things that we added this time was sharing. This nicely rounds out our existing online acccounts integration, and complements the work we did on editing six months ago.

Sharing is an important step towards a more tightly integrated online account experience in GNOME. We have been interested in a desktop-wide sharing service for some time. With Flatpak portals becoming a reality, I hope that the sharing feature in Photos can be spun off into a portal for GNOME.

Thanks to Umang Jain, our GSoC intern this summer for working on sharing.

We overhauled a lot of hairy architectural issues, which will let us have nicer overview grids in the near future. Alessandro created a Flatpak. This means that going forward, you can easily try out the nightly builds of Photos thanks to the Flatpak support in GNOME Software 3.22.

Thanks to Kalev Lember for the wonderful screenshot.

The future

I think that we are reaching a point where we can recommend Photos to a wider group of users. With editing and sharing in place, we have filled some of the bigger gaps in the user experience that we want to offer. Yes, there are some missing features and rough edges that we are aware of, so we we are going to spend the next six months addressing the ones that are most important. You can look at our roadmap for the full picture, but I am going to highlight a few.

Better overview grids (GNOME #690623)

We have been using GtkIconView to display the grid of thumbnails that we call the overview. GtkIconView has been around for a long while, but it has some issues – both visual and performance. Therefore, we want to replace it with GtkFlowBox so (a) that the application remains responsive while we are populating the grid, and (b) we can have really pretty visuals.

Eventually, we want this:

Import from device (GNOME #751212)

This is one of the biggest missing features, in my opinion. We really need a way to import content from removable devices and cameras that doesn’t involve mucking around with files and directories.

Petr Stetka has already started working on this, but I am sure he will appreciate any help with this.

More sharing (GNOME #766031)

Last but not the least, I definitely like showing off on Facebook and so do you! So I want to add a Facebook share-point and possibly a few more.

Come, join us

If any of this interests you, then feel free to jump right in. We have a curated list of newcomer bugs and a guide for those who are relatively new. If you are an experienced campaigner, you can look at the roadmap for more significant tasks.

For any help, discussions or general chitchat, #photos on GIMPNet is the place to be.