GNOME Photos is an application that lets you easily organize photos and screenshots. GNOME Photos doesn’t enforce a folder hierarchy. Instead, it relies on tracker to find and index photos inside well-known folders, such as Pictures in your home folder (~/Pictures).

Photos has steadily grown in its ability to edit pictures. For instance, GNOME Photos 3.24 recently added two new color adjustment options: exposure and blacks. Of course, the subject of digital photo editing is a deep one. Without going into too much detail, this article demonstrates the basic photo editing options available in GNOME Photos.

First, install Photos from the Software tool, or by using dnf along with sudo:

sudo dnf install gnome-photos

Run the app from the Overview by searching for “Photos.” The first time you run Photos, it populates its Photos tab with all image files found in ~/Pictures:

Adjusting Colors

Double-click on the photo you wish to edit. Click the pencil icon to open the Edit panel:

Click Colors, and a series of sliders expands.

These sliders control various enhancement effects to the image. This photo ended up under-exposed; the sensor probably detected too much light from the sky, leaving the beach without enough exposure time. Adjust the Exposure slider to the right and the image will update with an enhanced exposure.

Slide up the Saturation to deepen the sea and sky blues.

Applying a filter

Photos also ships with some canned filters. These filters apply preset adjustments to the photo to give it a particular style. For example, the Calistoga filter gives the beach a vintage/retro look:

Be sure to click Done to save the changes.

Non-destructive edits

Any time you edit a photo in Photos, it preserves the original. You can return to the original if you don’t like how your changes turn out. Open the Properties menu item and click Discard all Edits to revert the file to its original copy.

Set a background

Photos can also set pictures as the desktop background. First, crop the photo to your desired aspect ratio — 16×9 in this example.

Next, click Done. Then select the newly edited picture, and from the menu, select Set as Background.

Photos can do more than edit. It also integrates with GNOME Online Accounts, and can be set up to share photos to various online photo services. Photos also lets you organize your photos into albums. It even detects screenshots and automatically sorts them into a Screenshots album for you!