gthumb 2.11.2.1 — in Ubuntu 10.04 and the best free, open-source photo-editing app for Web journalists ever
Now I have a reason to grab onto Ubuntu 10.04 - or any system that includes gThumb 2.11.2.1.
This little image-viewer that could is now even better for anybody who works with JPEG images with embedded captions in IPTC format, which most photographers (and all photojournalists) use for caption and credit information, and which sits with the image in something called the "XML sidecar" (technical term, no?) and which makes my life as a Web editor much, much, much easier.
You know what the GIMP, Krita and almost all "image editing" software in the free and open-source world does to this IPTC/XML data? It cheerfully deletes it when you open and save a JPEG that previously contained it.
Helpful, right?
So people like me have to resort to using non-FOSS apps on non-FOSS platforms - you know Photoshop, and maybe even Photo Mechanic, the app my photographers all use to tag and process images.
No. I won't.
I do use IrfanView, a great image viewer for Windows that's free but not FOSS, and I've even used it in Wine (Bordeaux makes it easy).
Now I really don't need IrfanView, Bordeaux, Wine, Windows, Photoshop ... or GIMP, Krita or anything else.
For basic photo "editing," the two "top" Linux/Unix image-viewers — digiKam with Kipi Plugins (the latter brings the IPTC capability to the app) and gthumb (with a built-in extension that does IPTC) are really the only games in town.
Yes, there's another app - Mapivi - that deals with IPTC, but it's got nowhere near the polish of the KDE and GNOME photo viewers.
Notice I've left out F-Spot. That's because you can do almost nothing with it of a photo-editing nature. Gthumb beats it eight different ways.
Now you might be saying, "Just use digiKam - it's got more features." That is true, digiKam deals with most IPTC fields, does quite a bit of editing, and meets most of my specs.
But a) I'm not crazy about using a KDE app in a mostly-GNOME environment, and the digiKam interface is more than a little cluttered ... and it creates database files that I'm not interested in having on my system.
It does one thing gthumb doesn't do. That is sharpen images. But it's so hard to sharpen an image properly in digiKam - I've never been able to figure it out. They all come out looking horrible. gthumb doesn't sharpen, and truthfully I can live without it.
But gthumb edits the IPTC caption/credit and other data, it crops, it resizes and shrinks file size - that's 98 percent of what I need.
I've used gThumb in Ubuntu 8.04, Debian Lenny and FreeBSD 7.3-release.
The version I'm now running in Ubuntu 10.04 is the best yet - the interface is different (I'm still getting used to it), but the developers' expansion of the "metadata" feature has made it all worth it.
Previously gthumb could only get at the "caption" portion of the IPTC metadata. Now in this new version I can see credit information, tags, time and date — and all sorts of other data, most of which I don't need but a lot of which I definitely do.
In short, gthumb has been my personal "killer app" in Unix/Linux for the past six months, and now it's better by an order of magnitude.
All I need now is "sharpen" capability, and the final piece of my image-editing puzzle will be in place.
It would be great if the GIMP would finally add full IPTC editing capability, but it hasn't happened up to now and probably won't. And yes, if I knew how to do it, I'd code it myself, but I don't (and therefore can't).
But I couldn't be more grateful to the developers of gthumb for making my workflow even better than they've already made it over the past few months.
4 Comments
Leave a comment
About this blog
I agree with your assessment of gThumb (and digiKam). The biggest improvement I would like to see in gThumb is a bit better batch renaming capability. As far as I can see, it only allows incrementing of file numbers by 1, whereas I need to be able to select the increment.
I hope this helps and that we can see this capability in a new version of gThumb soon.
The fact that there is any ongoing development at all on gThumb is somewhat startling to me.
It has been included in the Debian default for a while, and has been in Fedora for a while — not a long time in either distro, I believe.
I think Fedora is going to start shipping with Shotwell in the default.
Since GNOME seems intent on tying itself tighter and tighter to all things Mono and insisting that the average user not be besieged by choices (or in this case actual functionality), I expect F-Shot and things like it to get more attention and things like gThumb to get less.
The fact that F-Spot is modeled after Apple's iPhoto is no strength because I find a lot of flaws in the iPhoto approach - chiefly the database-driven nature that ties you to a single app.
It's clear that the average KDE app, including digiKam has an overflowing of configuration and functionality. If only it looked better and did things a bit better (sharpening that worked and IPTC editing that didn't limit the individual fields to insanely short lengths), that app alone (along with kdenlive if it indeed works; I have no idea) would be a powerful incentive for me to drop GNOME and go over to KDE.
As it stands, gThumb is so very good at what I need in a basic photo-editing and -archiving application that the idea of not having it (and having it work) is something I wouldn't be happy about.
Before Ubuntu Lucid reverted to the "older" version of gThumb, I didn't have enough time to figure out the new UI, which had even better IPTC data access for JPEGs and pretty much solved the one problem I had with it (being able to edit the "credit/byline" field). So in that sense I'm looking forward to 2.11, but 2.10 is good enough for me to be happy with the app in Ubuntu Lucid.
I am a noobie trying to find a photo manager for a simple amateur. However, I have had some difficulty and wonder if somebody could help me.
1. I can't find a way to display captions on photos in a slideshow or in fullscreen mode. However, I can print captions. So far the only way I can find to have a slideshow with captions is to "print to pdf" (including the captions), and then to use Image Viewer (or Acrobat Reader) to present the pdf file as a slideshow. Anybody know how to include captions on a slideshow in gthumb?
2. When printing photos (just ctrl p), there are "layout" options for what to include in the photo caption--name, title, description, album, etc. I can set name, title, description using the "Comment" tool on the toolbar in viewer mode. However, the Comment tool will not allow me to set "album", nor some other fields that are available in "layout" when printing. Anybody know how to set these other fields--in particular "album"?
3. When printing an album, I would like to include a header and footer on each page--like OpenOffice Writer does. Does anybody know of a way to do this?
So far everything else seems to work pretty well.
I am running lucid and gthumb 2.12.1-3.
Thanks
Ralph
I can't help you with album printing. I'm probably in a very small minority in that the main reason I use Gthumb is its ability to edit the IPTC metadata in JPG images, which is how photojournalists the world over caption and identify their photos.
I can't seem to do it in my current version of Gthumb (2.11.5 in Debian Squeeze) and may just need to figure out the right command, but the ability to call an external editor such as the GIMP to do further work on a photo while retaining the IPTC data (which GIMP, Krita and most FOSS editors zap out) is huge, even though I don't often need anything more than what's in Gthumb to do my editing.
I like the fact that Gthumb doesn't use a database and keeps the photos in a traditional folder structure. That means I have the ultimate portability with my images. They're accessible by any program I wish, and I can move them around, even across architectures and operating systems, with no trouble.
Probably the only feature that Gthumb doesn't have but I really want is the ability to sharpen images. That's my No. 1 most-needed feature.
But Gthumb is a great application, and it's under active development and has only gotten better over the past year or so.