Shotwell 0.6.1 adds basic support for RAW images

The Yorba developers have released version 0.6.1 of their open source Shotwell photo manager for the GNOME desktop. According to the developers, the latest update to their free digital photo manager includes a number of bug fixes, language support improvements and several new features compared to the previous 0.5 release from mid-March.

Major improvements over the previous 0.5 update include basic support for RAW images, full support for PNG images and a new preferences dialog. Shotwell 0.6.1 now allows users to zoom into photos and adds the ability to open images in an external editor, such as GIMP. Other changes include a new photo trash can and the option to automatically import tags and titles from XMP and IPTC metadata. The developers advise all users to upgrade to the latest release.

The development team have already started development on the next major update to Shotwell, version 0.7. According to a mailing list post by Yorba founder and developer Adam Dingle, 0.7 will be on a shorter release cycle than the previous updates and will feature library directory monitoring, support for video files, a migration tool for F-Spot users and allow users to rate photos on a scale of 1-5 stars. Shotwell 0.7.0 is scheduled to be released "some time in August".

More details about the 0.6.1 release can be found in the official release announcement. Pre-compiled binaries of Shotwell 0.6.1 are available to download for Fedora, Ubuntu and Windows and a user guide is provided. Shotwell source code is licensed under version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL v2.1). Shotwell is the default default photo manager in Fedora 13 and it will replace F-Spot in the next 10.10 release of Ubuntu.

See also:

• Canonical releases Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha 2, a report from The H.
• Rock it - What's new in Fedora 13, a feature from The H.

(crve)