Building and Installing

This page is for people who want to build Shotwell from source. If you're looking for binaries, see the Shotwell home page.

Source Download

There are two ways to download the Shotwell source code:

  • Download the tarball: This is recommended for users who want a stable release. Once downloaded, unpack the tarball in a directory and follow the commands below. The tarball is located at http://www.yorba.org/shotwell.
  • Pull the latest sources from trunk: This is for developers and power users who want to try out and hack on the latest code. Check out the source from our Subversion server: 
% svn co svn://svn.yorba.org/shotwell/trunk shotwell

Dependencies

Shotwell 0.4.3's dependencies include:

For each library, the version indicated above or later is required. Later versions are generally preferable.

To build Shotwell from trunk, hal is no longer needed but you additionally need gudev-1.0 (at least version 145). You also need Vala 0.7.10.

Fedora

On Fedora, you can fetch build dependencies for Shotwell 0.4.3 like this: 

% sudo yum install dbus-glib-devel GConf2-devel gtk2-devel hal-devel libexif-devel libgphoto2-devel \
                   libsoup-devel libxml2-devel sqlite-devel unique-devel webkitgtk-devel

To build Shotwell from trunk, you need libgudev1-devel instead of hal-devel.

openSUSE

On openSUSE, you can fetch build dependencies for Shotwell 0.4.3 like this: 

% sudo zypper install dbus-1-devel gconf2-devel gtk-devel hal-devel libexif-devel libgphoto2-devel \
                      libsoup-devel libxml2-devel sqlite3-devel libunique-devel libwebkit-devel

To build Shotwell from trunk, you need libgudev-1_0-devel instead of hal-devel.

In openSUSE 11.2, the vala package is too old for Shotwell, so you'll need to build it from source yourself. gee-1.0 is unavailable as a package, so you'll need to build it as well.

Ubuntu

On Ubuntu, you can fetch build dependencies for Shotwell 0.4.3 like this: 

% sudo apt-get install libdbus-glib-1-dev libgconf2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libhal-dev libexif-dev \
                       libgphoto2-2-dev libsoup2.4-dev libsqlite3-dev libunique-dev libwebkit-dev \
                       libxml2-dev

If you're building Shotwell from trunk, you need libgudev-1.0-dev in place of libhal-dev.

The versions of gee-1.0 and vala in release 9.10 (Karmic Koala) are too old for Shotwell, so you'll need to build these from source yourself or get them from the Vala team's PPA at https://launchpad.net/~vala-team .

Building and Installation

To build and install Shotwell on Linux, cd to the directory Shotwell was unpacked or checked-out to and type the following commands: 

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
  • By default, Shotwell will install in /usr/local. The configure script can customize the prefix directory. Run ./configure --help for instructions and other installation options.
  • You need to execute make install as root (i.e. sudo make install) if installing to system directories.

Windows

To build Shotwell on Windows, see this page.

Running Shotwell

You may execute Shotwell directly from its build directory by typing ./shotwell. However, desktop integration won't be available without a full installation.

Once installed, Shotwell will be available on your desktop Applications menu under Graphics or Photography. Also, if you plug a digital camera into your machine, Shotwell will be available as an option to automatically launch.

See Using Shotwell for more information on how to import, view, modify, and export your digital photos.

Uninstalling Shotwell

Run make uninstall. As with make install, you may need root privileges to do this.