Using Shotwell

Introduction

Shotwell is a digital photo organizer designed for the GNOME desktop environment. It allows you to import photos from disk or camera, organize them in various ways, view them in full-window or fullscreen mode, and export them to share with others.

Please visit  http://www.yorba.org/shotwell for the current state of its development and to make sure you're running the latest version.

Make sure you've installed Shotwell before starting.

Running Shotwell

Shotwell may be executed directly from its build directory, although this is only recommended for testing out Shotwell or developers.

Once installed, Shotwell is available in your Applications menu under Graphics or Photography. Shotwell may also be executed automatically when a camera is plugged in to your computer. Check your "Preferred Applications" settings to enable Shotwell to run when a camera is detected.

When you first run Shotwell, you'll be presented when an empty window and two views: Photos and Events. Your first task will be to begin populating your photo library.

Importing Photos

There are three ways to import photos: via drag-and-drop, from a digital camera, and from the File menu:

• Drag-and-drop: Simple drag photos from your file manager and drop them onto the Shotwell window. You may drag files or directories. The photos will be imported into your library. By default, photos are copied to your library directory (the Pictures directory in your home directory). If you hold down Ctrl+Shift while dragging photos in, Shotwell will import the photos without copying them.
• Camera: Connect your digital camera to your computer. Shotwell will detect it and list it in the sidebar. When you select the camera, Shotwell will load previews of each photo. You may choose specific photos to import or to import them all.
• File menu: Select File -> Import From Folder ... and select a directory from the chooser dialog box. Shotwell will scan the directory and all sub-directories for photo files and automatically import them.  By default, photos are copied to your library directory (the Pictures directory in your home directory).  The Import From Folder dialog contains a checkbox "Copy files to Pictures photo library"; if you clear this checkbox then photos will not be copied.

Shotwell uses  gPhoto to communicate with digital cameras. If your camera does not appear in Shotwell's sidebar or there is a problem importing photos, visit  http://gphoto.sourceforge.net/proj/libgphoto2/support.php to see if it's supported.

Viewing Your Photos

The sidebar on the left side of the window lists various views of your library. Each view is known as a collection. Although you may see the same photo in multiple collections, it's only stored once on your hard drive. Each collection links to that copy.

The Photos collection displays all the photographs in your library. This page can get quite large depending on the number of photos you import. That's where events come in.

An event is simply a group of photos that were taken at approximately the same time. When you import photos, Shotwell looks for tags within the photos left by your camera indicating the time the photograph was exposed. Shotwell then clusters the photos into events. With events you can see all the photos you took the morning of Groundhog Day or last New Year's Eve.

If you select the Events item in the sidebar, you'll see a single photo which represents each event. This is called the key photo. Double-clicking on the key photo will take you to that collection.

In the sidebar, the events are stored in a tree by year and month of the earliest photo in the event. You can't move events around in the hierarchy directly--they're always stored sorted by their date.

Future versions of Shotwell will also have albums, which are collections created and organized by you rather than automatically generated during import and maintained by date.

Display

On the bottom right-hand corner of the window is a slider. You may adjust the viewing size of the thumbnails, from small (to see a lot of photos at once) to large (allowing you to see fewer photos but in greater detail). You may also adjust the size of the thumbnails using the square bracket keys ([ and ]).

At the bottom of the sidebar there is a Basic Information pane, which displays a brief summary of the photo (or photos) you've selected. If no photos are selected, it displays a summary of the entire collection. This can be disabled in the View drop-down menu. You can also enable a floating Extended Information window.

The View drop-down menu holds other options, including whether to display the name of each photo and how they're sorted.

You may view a photo full-window by double-clicking on it. From there you may cycle through the other photos in the collection with the Back and Forward buttons. To return to the collection, double-click on the photo or press Esc.

Shotwell offers a fullscreen mode to display photos. Choose Photos -> Fullscreen or press F11. To see the fullscreen toolbar, move your mouse to the bottom of the screen. The toolbar offers buttons to move through the collection, to pin the toolbar down (so it doesn't hide when you move the mouse away), and to leave full-screen view.

NOTE: Fullscreen mode will flicker under Compiz when the toolbar appears and disappears. Other applications (such as Firefox) have similar issues. This can be fixed by setting this value to FALSE in GConf: /apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/unredirect_fullscreen_windows. Note that this may impact graphic-intensive apps that run in fullscreen. More info:  http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/03/fix-for-flickering-fullscreen-application-with-compiz/

Organizing Your Photos

Any organizational actions can be undone and redone by choosing Edit -> Undo or Edit -> Redo, respectively.

Selection

When working in a collection view, you must select one or more photos before you begin. Clicking on a photo selects it. Holding down Ctrl and clicking selects multiple photos. You may also click and drag to select multiple photos. Selecting events works the same way.

Photos

If you really like some photos, you can promote them to the status of favorite. To do so, select the photos and choose Photos -> Mark as Favorite. You will be able to see a gold star in the lower right corner of the photo. To unmark selected photos, choose Photos -> Unmark as Favorite. If you only want to view your favorite photos, you can toggle the menu item View -> Only Favorites.

If you don't want to see a photo but still want to keep it in your library, you can hide it by selecting it and choosing Photos -> Hide. To see hidden photos, toggle the menu item View -> Hidden Photos. Once visible, hidden photos have a red X in the lower right corner. You can unhide selected photos by choosing Photos -> Unhide.

To create multiple copies of a photo in your library, select the photo or photos you would like to duplicate and choose Edit -> Duplicate. This creates a second copy of the original file on your hard drive.

Events

Recall that events are displayed by using a key photo to represent the event. By default, Shotwell selects the first photo in each event for its key photo. To use a different key photo, select it and choose Photos -> Make Key Photo for Event. To give an event a name rather than refer to it by its date, choose Edit -> Rename Event...

Even though events are always stored by their date, you can move photos between events, which can affect their sort order. To move photos between events, drag any imported photos to the sidebar and drop them on an event name.

There are currently two more ways to manipulate events: creating new events and merging events. To create a new event, select the photos you would like in the new event and choose Events -> New Event. To merge events, navigate to the Events item in the sidebar, or any of the other pages in the hierarchy that store events. Select the events you wish to merge and choose Events -> Merge Events.

Editing Your Photos

The current version of Shotwell offers a number of editing tools to adjust the size and orientation of the photo and to adjust its colors.

A Note About Editing

Shotwell is a non-destructive photo editor. It does not modify your original photographs. That is to say, if you rotate or crop a photo, the copy in your library remains untouched. Shotwell stores your edits in a database and applies them on-the-fly as necessary.

This means you can always undo any alterations you make to a photograph. It also means Shotwell can minimize the number of copies of a photo it stores on your hard drive while still offering an undo option. See Revert to Original, below, for more information.

If you want to see what the original photo looks like compared to your modifications, press and hold the Shift key. The original photo will display as long as you hold the key down.

Rotation

You can rotate your photos left and right (clockwise and counterclockwise) with the Rotate button on the toolbar of most views. If you select more than one image, you can rotate all of them at the same time. You may also make a mirror image of any photo.

To rotate left, click on the button. To rotate left, press and hold the Ctrl key and then click the button. Both commands are available in the Photos menu.

If you wish to create a mirror image of the photo, use the Mirror command in the Photos menu.

Auto-Enhance

One of the easiest ways to improve a photo is to try the Enhance button. This tool quickly analyzes the photo's colors and contrast and adjusts it for a better picture. This simple step may bring out colors and details lost due to lighting issues.

To fine-tune the adjustments the auto-enhance tool makes, click on the Adjust button (see Color Adjustments, below).

Cropping

To reduce the area of a photo and concentrate the viewer's attention on a smaller portion of it, use the Crop tool. The crop tool is only available in full-window or fullscreen mode. Double-click on a photo to enter full-window mode, then press the Crop button on the toolbar.

A white box will appear over the photo. If you place your cursor in the middle of the box, you may move the crop border. If you click on the edges of the box, you can adjust its size. The lighter portion of the photo within the crop rectangle represents what the photo will look like when you crop it.

As you move and adjust the crop box, you'll see four lines appear inside it, like a tic-tac-toe grid. These represent Rule of Thirds lines. In general, you want your photos' subject matter to fall within these lines. See  this Wikipedia article for a more complete explanation.

You may also constrain the crop box to one of many common sizes. Select a size from the list control that suits your needs. If you press the flip button next to it, the orientation of the constraint will switch (from landscape to portrait).

When you're happy with your crop outline, press the Apply button. Shotwell will display the cropped photo. If you change your mind, press the Crop button again and fine-tune the crop.

If you press Cancel rather than Apply, Shotwell will return to the photo's previous crop dimensions. If you wish to remove the crop entirely, see "Revert to Original", below.

Red-eye

Red-eye occurs when the camera's flash reflects off the pupil. (See  this Wikipedia article for a fuller explanation of the effect.) To eliminate this in a photo, use the Red-eye tool. Drag the circle over the affected pupil, adjust its size with the slider control, and press Apply. Repeat this process for all red pupils in your photo. Press Close when finished.

Color Adjustments

The Adjust button opens a floating window with a  histogram and sliders to adjust a photo's exposure, saturation, tint, temperature, and shadows. The histogram also has sliders to reduce the upper and lower intensity thresholds of the photograph, expanding the contrast of the middle range.

The Enhance button adjusts the histogram and shadows slider to improve the quality of a photo.

When the photo's colors and contrast are to your liking, press Apply to save the changes. Reset will zero all the sliders, returning the image to its original state. Cancel discards all changes you've made.

Revert to Original

The effects of all of these tools can be individually undone and redone via the Undo and Redo commands in the Edit menu, but these are only remembered as long as Shotwell is running. In addition, if you ever decide to completely undo all the changes you've made to a photograph, you can remove them all with Photos -> Revert to Original, regardless of whether the edits were made in the current session of Shotwell. This option is available both in full-window view and the collections views.

Sharing Photos

Exporting

If you wish to export your photos from Shotwell, you can do this in one of two ways:

• Drag-and-drop: Like importing, you can export photos by dragging them from a collection and onto a file manager window, your desktop, or another application which accepts dropped files. The new files will be full-sized copies of the photos in your library.
• File Export: If you use the drop-down menu version of export, you can fine-tune the size and dimensions of your photo files. Select the photo(s) you wish to export and click on File -> Export. A dialog box will appear allowing you to choose the image quality (Low, Medium, High, and Maximum), the Scaling constraint (which means how Shotwell will decide to scale the photos down), and the desired pixel size. All of these criteria go into determining the final size of the photo file.

Publishing

Shotwell is able to share photos over the Internet services  Facebook and  Flickr, both of which require an account, which is free.

To publish selected photos in a collection, press the Publish toolbar button. This command is also available in the File menu. When you publish photos, you will encounter a dialog that allows you to choose whether to publish to Facebook or Flickr. Once you selected your preferred publishing service, you will need to log in or create an account.

Publishing to Facebook gives you the option to allow the Shotwell Connect application to automatically access some features of Facebook. None of these are required for Shotwell Connect to work properly, but we recommend that you at least allow uploads so that you won't have to approve the photos manually. Once you are logged in and have set your preferences, you may choose to publish to an existing album or to create a new album.

Similarly, publishing to Flickr requires you to log in and permit Shotwell Connect to access your account.

Removing & Deleting Photos

If you want to remove old or bad photos from your library, simply select them and choose Edit -> Remove. (You can also press the Delete key.) The photos will be removed from your library. When you select Remove you'll be asked if the photo files should be removed from your hard drive as well. This operation cannot be undone, so be careful.

Photo Viewer

Shotwell has a photo viewing mode that lets you open a photo directly without importing it into your library. In this mode you can edit photos just as if they were in your library. Once you save, however, you will be unable to undo your changes or revert back to the original photo. For more information on editing photos, refer to the Editing Your Photos section above.

To use the photo viewer, you can make Shotwell your default application for opening photos or you can right-click on a photo and explicitly ask it to open with the Shotwell Photo Viewer. You can alternatively run Shotwell from the command line and specify a photo filename as an argument.

In photo viewing mode, the back and forward arrow keys will open other photos in the current directory.