How To Build A Photo Library In Shotwell

Nick Peers reveals how to bring order to your chaotic photo and video library with Ubuntu’s default photo organiser.

Digital photography has been become both a blessing and a curse. It’s almost inconceivable to remember the time when every photo was precious, eagerly awaited with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Nowadays, digital clutters up your hard drive with dozens – if not hundreds – of photos for every major life event, never mind the rest.

Thankfully, there’s a tool that can help bring order to your chaotic collection. Shotwell doesn’t simply bring your photos into a single library: you can use it to organise them a myriad of different ways, from datebased events to keyword tags. It even offers a selection of handy image-editing tools to help lift lacklustre photos through creative use of colour and light correction, cropping, straightening and even removal of the dreaded red-eye.

Shotwell is included by default with both Ubuntu and Mint, but it’s an old version (0.28.4). Step one, therefore, is to ensure you’re running the latest version – 0.30.1 at time of writing. Open a Terminal window and issue the following commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yg-jensge/shotwell

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install shotwell