GNOME Photos is an application for browsing, editing and organizing photos. Organizing photos just became a lot faster now that Photos supports importing directly from SD cards and connected cameras.

First, install Photos with either GNOME Software, or by using dnf along with sudo:

sudo dnf install gnome-photos

However, as of Fedora 28 Workstation, Photos is already installed!

Importing photos

After connecting the digital camera or inserting the SD card, open Photos. A notification appears at the top of the window identifying the camera detected. Click Import…

Select the photos to import, or click “Select items for import” to toggle select all or select none. Once selected, click Select.

Next, either select an existing album or create a new album for the imported photos.

That’s it! The album should now be populating with photos. If a lot of photos were selected, it could take a while to copy everything. Photos doesn’t store files in a special database. When Photos creates a new album, it creates a corresponding directory inside ~/Pictures.

More improvements to GNOME Photos

Editing photos is now faster too. Photos uses an image processing library called GEGL to load, edit and export files. As a result of some improvements to GEGL, decoding images with embedded orientation in them is now 15 times faster than the previous version!

In addition to the exposure and black level adjustments, Photos can now adjust shadows and highlights. Be sure to check out the previous article for an introduction to the editing tools.

Many more features were added to GNOME Photos in 3.28. See the project’s roadmap for more details.