In today's Ubuntu 10.04 beta updates, gthumb downgraded from 2.11 to 2.10
I had heard that gthumb was being downgraded in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid because the 2.11 build was supposedly not stable enough for an LTS release.
Well, it did happen today. The differences between gthumb 2.11 and 2.10 are startling. The enhancements to the IPTC metadata framework are gone, but the ability to do a slideshow (which I don't care about) and perhaps the ability to open images in other editors (which I do care about but couldn't figure out in 2.11 whether that feature was removed or just "moved") are back where I can see and use them.
Webupd8 is all over this change and also plans to offer a PPA for gthumb 2.11.3, which I'll either be using soon unless I decide to compile my own package.
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Hi Steven :)
Last time I read one of your blog entries you were trying to install Irfanview on Ubuntu if I remember correctly :) And so was I. Well I can relate to your quest, I work in the internet media and I'm desperately looking for that perfect photo editor for Linux.
Surprise, I also discovered that gThumb is very usable this time around, although, my small, 260-270px wide resizes (and those happen to be important) are a bit blurry. Any idea how to sharpen them?
Anyway I'm finding that yours is one of the more useful Linux blogs I came across, since we both use the OS in a similar professional environment. Well, good luck :)
Darija, I haven't had problems with blurry images when resizing. The one feature that gthumb lacks that we both could really use is sharpen.
I'm curious, in gthumb, what percentage are you using to resample the JPEGs? I generally use 80, which gives me good enough quality with small enough file size.
I have some entries here on running Irfanview with the Bordeaux spin of Wine. Installing Irfanview through Bordeaux is very easy. Getting the plugins installed was harder but quite doable. You might want to go in that direction if you really need the features of Irfanview.
For me, I'm on the fence: Irfanview sharpens and does batch processing - two things you can't get in gthumb.
For now I do like the way gthumb runs, so when I'm doing production in Linux, that's what I use.
I haven't yet bothered to install Bordeaux and Irfanview on my new Ubuntu-running laptop.
I use 100 pct quality. Well it could be that I'm just fussy, they are somewhat blurrier than what I get on my desktop in the office (with ACDSee). But now I tend to work all the time from my notebook even in the office so I need a fully functional all Linux system.
And I do get batch resizing, which is one batch I need the most, in gThumb as well.
Irfanview I can install fine under regular Wine (although I haven't yet tried with Ubuntu 10.04) by adding two XP dlls to the Wine sys32, but I'd much rather have a native Linux program for a number of reasons...
I wonder, did you ever try Xnview? It's supposed to be an Irfanview clone. I once tried converting the package to .deb (via alien) but got a very crippled app once it installed. Unusable to all intents and purposes.
I'll have to do some experiments with gthumb and post the results - you know, gthumb vs. Irfanview for image quality.
I never do 100 percent - the files are too big and they load too slowly.
Maybe you really want/need the sharpen feature.
If you can do without the IPTC data, GIMP is a lot more flexible. Otherwise try digiKam - that has a whole lot more features, although my results weren't that great - it was too hard to use.
I have noticed a change in Gthumb since Upgrading to Lucid...
I always resize my jpegs at 85. Previously there was no difference in quality, but it has got very noticeable! Very irritating and I started using Gimp to resize which takes alot more time but the quality is much better and size less than 10kb difference in size