Use Shotwell Instead of Picasa

Here we are with another episode of our “Leaving Google” series. Today is the day we leave Picasa, as we don’t need anything else other than Shotwell, a great media handler which is also the default choice of our favorite Linux distro: Ubuntu.

Shotwell is a relatively new open source photo organizer application designed for the GNOME desktop environment. It allows you to import photos from your camera, view and edit them, and share them with others. It even has multi image per page printing capabilities which I like.

You don’t need anything else than this wonderful piece of software to do whatever you used to do with Picasa. You can import your photos and organize them in albums and events. You can handle RAW images you shot with your camera and even adjust them.

Shotwell features an “enhancing feature”, which tries to fix your pics automatically, as well as rotation, crop and red-eye fix. 99% of the time the enhancement feature works wonders. And with a simple click you will always be able to go back to the original version of your shot.

With Shotwell you can also share your pics, albums and events with your friends, simply using the “upload” feature integrated in the software, which lets you upload your pics to a wide range of web services.

Shotwell supports tagging and smart organizations of pics, so that you can easily handle your collection, no matter how big it is. Indeed, that’s exactly how we roll, as since we met Shotwell over a year ago we stopped using Picasa all together.

What’s more important is that Shotwell is developed by a community made of people who actually mind about your privacy, and you won’t have to let Google handle your pics, which is something good since the big G started getting shadier and shadier.

Shotwell comes under the terms of Gnu General Public License and hence you can modify, improve and redistribute the code. It is included in the standard distribution of Ubuntu, as well as in other popular distros like Fedora.

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