Recently in gThumb Category

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.

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.

In OMG! Ubuntu!, a report that gThumb replaces F-Spot in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (likely so the heft of Mono can be expunged) actually goes on to say that not only does gThumb not use Mono, but it does more than F-Spot.

For my particular workflow, gThumb has become my main image editor.

Way back in November, OMG! Ubuntu! took a look at gThumb 2.x, going so far as to ask in the title, "Is The New gThumb A Potential F-Spot Killer?"

Of course, I think the answer to that question is an unqualified "yes."

I've been experimenting with "calling" the GIMP in through gThumb to do some extra editing on an image, with the goal being more control over editing (gThumb doesn't sharpen, probably the biggest omission for Web-photo editing) without losing the IPTC metadata in JPEGs that photojournalists routinely use to drop caption and credit information into the image file. I've had a mix of success/not-so-much-success, but I'll continue testing until I know for sure if and how gThumb and GIMP can be used together without killing out the IPTC data (which GIMP, Krita and just about every other Linux/Unix image editor cheerfully kills when saving; exceptions to this unwarranted destruction of JPEG data are gThumb, digiKam and MaPiVi, the best of the latter being, in my opinion, gThumb).

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.)