Recently in iPhoto Category

The OMG!Ubuntu blog reports on the decision, however preliminary, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas to remove the GIMP image editor from the 10.04 Lucid LTS release of the wildly popular Linux distribution.

Read the well-wrought entry linked above for the drawn-out reasoning behind moving the "professional"-quality Photoshop killer GIMP from the Ubuntu base (it'll be available in the Ubuntu Software Center, or your other favorite package-management tool).

Those assembled seem to think that GIMP is not used enough and is not consumery enough. And that the F-Spot photo manager can do basic photo editing and is much better for the average user.

Oh, do I have bones — plural — to pick over this one. I still haven't made my decision on whether I'm for Mono (using the Microsoft-compatible open-source tools) apps or against them (and F-Spot, along with Tomboy notes and, if you've added it, the Banshee music player seem in my mind anyway to be the highest-profile Mono apps in the GNOME world).

All I can say is that with the geek-political climate these days, more Mono rather than the same or less will just give more users a reason to jump off of GNOME (and Ubuntu) in order to keep one's collective hands, if not clean, than at least Microsoft-free.

Again, I haven't made a personal decision about Mono as yet, but I'm far from happy with F-Spot.

And yes, I've been using it somewhat regularly. For my purposes, I'm not crazy about having to import images into F-Spot. digiKam can deal with images in any directory structure, and I'd like my photo-organizing program to do the same. I understand that F-Spot is more iPhoto-like in this aspect. I still don't like it. It's OK for my personal images, but I can't keep my businessy images separate. Everything's in one big pile in F-Spot, except when you dig into the actual directory structure the app creates. Yep, just like iPhoto.

In F-Spot I can add a caption in the "comments" area. Unfortunately that data does not come up in any other applications I use to edit or view photos. I can't edit the IPTC data that 100 percent of professional photojournalists use (and those are the guys whose images I handle day in and out).

F-Spot will sharpen and adjust the color of images. It will crop them. But it won't resize them. Huge, huge deal-breaker for my "professional" use of this application. (And why would I use something for my "home" images that won't do the job with my real work if I don't have to?)

Truth be told, I don't require all that Photoshop offers. On the PC I use IrfanView. And basically my "quest" for a Linux/Unix image viewing/editing program runs along the lines of "give me something that does what IrfanView can do."

Even the GIMP (and Krita, too, O fans of KDE) can't deal with the IPTC data in JPEG images, which I absolutely need.

The digiKam image manager in KDE, through the great Kipi Plugins, CAN deal with this data, and pretty well, too (although the limit on the length of the IPTC credit line is a bit grating and seemingly unnecessary).

So I've been using digiKam for the past few weeks somewhat regularly. (Truth be told, I tend to work in IrfanView on my Windows box at the office about 80 percent of the time when editing photos; it's the environment I know, and that does what I want it to do.)

digiKam is a bit unwieldly. Like many KDE apps, there are menus for days, along with choices to match. It resizes. Good. It sharpens (although the results aren't as good, seemingly, as in every other app that sharpens images; there are, again, lots of choices, and I barely understand — and can't get a great result — from them. digiKam can crop, but you can't enter the exact dimensions of your crop in pixels and then drag the box around to make the perfect crop like I do in IrfanView. Not a deal-breaker, but not good either.

And did I say digiKam is unwieldy. Why are there separate "edit" modes for the metadata and the image data?

I've had little ol' gThumb on this Ubuntu machine for awhile. And hearing that the UDS suggested and then rejected it as a "replacement" for either GIMP and/or F-Spot prompted me to try it out. Sure I had opened a few images, but I hadn't yet done any heavy lifting with gThumb.

It was time.

Gthumb, little ol' gThumb (that's what I'll call it for the purposes of this entry), does almost everything I need:

-- Deals with images in their current directory structure
-- Resizes images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Crops images to exact pixel dimensions
-- Can edit/add IPTC caption info (to the main caption area only) with the "comments" feature
-- Allows for easy save-as of images

The only thing gThumb doesn't seem to do (and I could be missing it, though I don't think I am) is sharpen images. I can live without that, especially if gThumb can create and won't destroy existing IPTC data in JPEGs.

(Note: Besides Krita and GIMP, my previous favorite light image editor for Linux, MtPaint, is also an IPTC-data-destroyer and therefore can't be used for my "real" work.)

So thanks UDS people, for mentioning gThumb. And if you're asking my advice, and I know for damn sure that you're not, keep the GIMP or don't. I'll install it anyway.

But look deep into your geeky, geeky hearts and find it within them to replace F-Spot with gThumb. Or at very least make gThumb part of the Ubuntu base, make it the default image-organizing app, and let the rest of the free, open-source software-using world discover this most worthy of applications that for the most part can free me from the purgatory of Windows-based photo editing applications for good.

(And while I'm on the well-trod soapbox, let me mention that I wrote this entire entry using the newish Webkit-based Epiphany Web browser, another lovely bit of GNOME that I liked in its Gecko days but like even more now.)

(And sorry [really] about all those parentheses, within which I'm thinking all too often these days.)

I've heard so much praise for Amazon's Kindle electronic reading device but little dissent.

I've only seen the Sony version of the reader, which uses much of the same hardware as the Amazon model. What stopped me from gushing over the device was its screen. The way the words look is more than a little bit crude, and I found that page turns took too long. I'd much rather have a regular book or even a PDF on a PC than what the Kindle and Sony models offer.

Today I see a ZDNet post from David Morgenstern, who also doesn't think the Kindle has what it takes to beat either the iPhone as an e-reader or a real book:

One of my neighbors, a designer of hardware interfaces for professional video editing systems, bought a Kindle a couple of months ago. He put it up for sale on eBay less than a day later. He said the hardware design was "terrible."

After borrowing and using his Kindle, I understood his rejection of the device. It presents a cluttered interface. And worse, it changed pages when I picked it up, with my fingers touching the long Previous and Next Page bars on the sides. This was his experience as well. (I notice from most publicity photos that the Kindle is held in the left hand from the lower left corner. Maybe that's the secret but that's awkward.)

In addition, I found the roller bar and its cursor track icon difficult to line up with items on the screen. And its browser was very slow.

We have a Mac at home, and we have a digital camera, too.

Nothing unusual there, right?

So we use iPhoto, part of the often-free-with-your-Mac iLife suite, to download and manage our digital photos.

OK, Ilene does it. Truth be told, I look to her to help me with most things Mac since the iBook G4 is her main computer, which she uses for everything related to the classes she teaches, from research and preparing PowerPoint presentations to delivering those presentations, creating tests and assignments, logging grades, blogging and way more.

I did rescue the iBook from an ailing hard drive, an operation that took more than a couple hours of sweaty, painstaking work to complete.

Once I set up a backup drive with SuperDuper for this 10.3.9-equipped laptop (which doesn't have and won't be getting OS X 10.5's Time Machine), I figured I was done with Mac crises for the time being.

Then iPhoto "forgot" how to display our many thousand photos.

Upon starting the application, the screen would read "Loading Photos ..." forever. Yet the photos, in their many iPhoto-created folders, were right where they always have been. A check of iPhoto in a smaller account with only a few hundred photos revealed that iPhoto, the application, was working.

It was just the database holding our 3,000+ photos that wasn't working.

I did everything recommended in David Pogue's excellent "iLife '05: The Missing Manual." I threw out Preferences files, ditched database files, relaunched iPhoto a half-dozen times.

Nothing worked.

Finally I resorted to the last remaining tip from "iLife '05: The Missing Manual": The iPhoto Extractor application.

I installed iPhoto Extractor, turned it loose on my "damaged" iPhoto database, extracted the 3,000+ photos, then reimported them into iPhoto.

Sure, any changes we made to individual photos (including rotating them so they were right-side up), any albums we may have created to organize said photos (and yes, we had many) were gone.

But the photos themselves were all there.

I have my idol David Pogue to thank for that (any tech journalist with his own book imprint richly deserves idolatry — and gets it from me, big time).

I also have the people behind iPhoto Extractor to thank for dragging all of those photos out of the many, many folders created by iPhoto in which they're stored and allowing me to see them all, back them up without all that iPhoto baggage and then reimport them into iPhoto, something I did but am not very happy about at all.

I'd be more happy just creating my own system of folders and files which wouldn't be compromised by the application that created them.

For the time being, I'll keep using iPhoto (although I should probably upgrade to a newer version than the Version 4 we have now), but I'll be very, very interested to know what my non-iLife options are for managing and archiving photos in OS X.