http://www.techradar.com/pro/linux May 2019 LXF249 63
Organise photos TuTorials
SelectEdit>
Preferences
> Libraryto
configurethe
folderstructurefor
photoscopiedinto
yourlibrary.IMportpHotoSFroMaCaMera
Pictures folder for images and videos, which appear
as a list of thumbnails organised by the file’s date- and
timestamp, newest first. You’ll see several options for
filtering photos and videos by type at the top of the
screen, plus a search box to quickly look for photos
using keywords, which will become more useful as
you organise your photos.
Double-click an item to either view it in Shotwell’s
built-in picture viewer or – if it’s a video – in your default
movie player. When viewing photos, use your mouse’s
scroll wheel or the magnification slider to zoom in and
out, and click and drag to move around the photo.
Double-click again to return to the main view.
Importing photos and videos
These days, it’s not uncommon for people to have a
different folder than the standard Pictures in which to
store photos. Shotwell enables you to import photos
and video from several sources in different ways. The
simplest is to drag and drop a folder or file from the
Files application onto the Shotwell window, or you can
go down the traditional route via its File menu: choose
File > Import From Folder to choose a folder on another
drive or camera memory card you’ve plugged into a
reader. Select your folder or drive, and leave ‘Recurse
Into Subfolders’ ticked to ensure the photos inside
subfolders are also included when Shotwell adds them
to your library. Click OK.
Shotwell will then give you one of two options: ‘Copy
Photos’ physically copies the files into your Pictures
folder, organised into subfolders based on the year,
month and day corresponding to the datestamp on
each photo – for example, 2019 > 04 > 03 for photos
dated 3 April 2019. This option will check – and strip
out – any duplicates it finds. Alternatively, choose
‘Import in Place’ and nothing will be copied, but the files
become part of your Shotwell library. Should you later
move these files, Shotwell will lose the link to them.
Shotwell also supports importing files from memory
cards or digital cameras – see the box (bottom right)
for more details.
If you want to copy photos into a single folder, but
don’t want to use your Pictures folder for whatever
reason, or you don’t like the MMMM\YY\DD folder
structure, choose Edit > Preferences > Library tab.
Start by specifying an alternative location for your
Shotwell library – tick ‘Watch library directory for new
files’ if you’d like your library to automatically update
whenever new files are copied into the library folder.
You can also select a different folder structure from
here, such as ‘Year/Month’ to group photos by month
rather than day. Alternatively, select Custom to set up
your own chronologically based structure using regular
expressions. Click Help next to the Pattern box for a full
list, such as ‘%b’ for a three-letter abbreviation of the
month name (‘Apr’) instead of the two-digit number.
Organise your library
Shotwell’s left-hand pane offers several options that
relate to the way photos and videos are organised and
viewed – click one to switch to that view. The Library
view is self-explanatory – a straight choice between all
photos or those you most recently imported, plus the
wastebasket to which entries in the library can be
dragged. It’ll also display missing and flagged photos
(more on that shortly). The Shotwell library itself
doesn’t contain any physical links to your actual photo
files; instead, think of it as a virtual database layer that
sits on top of your photos. This means that anything
you ‘do’ to your photos in Shotwell – whether
organising them by adding tags or altering their date,
or by editing the photos themselves – isn’t applied to
the physical files. In other words, it’s non-destructive by
default, but if you want to apply certain changes to the
real files there are ways to do this, as we’ll see.
Let’s start by looking at the different ways in which
Shotwell organises your files. By default, all photos and
videos in your library are displayed together, sorted by
date, with the newest shown first. You can alter this by
choosing View > Sort Photos, where you’ll find options
for displaying by title, filename or rating, plus choose
whether to view in descending (newest or last first) or
ascending order.
This view obviously becomes impractical incredibly
quickly, which is where all the viewing and filtering
options become useful. First, without doing any
additional work you can browse by date using the
Events view. Click ‘All Events’ or select a year or month
from the list to group all photos by date. Roll your
mouse over an individual day to see quick-fire previews
of all the photos inside, then double-click to show just
the photos taken on that day. Other viewing options
include Imports, which records each separate importYou can also import directly from your camera – Shotwell uses
gPhoto 2, which supports most models (visit http://bit.ly/
lxf249gphoto for a list of over 2,500 models). Connect your camera
to your PC with a USB cable, then with Shotwell open, switch the
camera on. After a short pause you should see your camera’s
pictures fill the Shotwell window – look in the left-hand menu where
you should see a new Cameras submenu with a ‘Mass Storage
Camera’ entry indicating it has been recognised.
Tick the ‘Hide photos already imported’ to prevent accidentally
importing the same photo twice in future, then either click ‘Import All’
to bring them all across to your photo library, or Ctrl-click those
photos you wish to import before clicking ‘Import Selected’. Wait
while Shotwell imports the photos – you’ll see each photo appear one
after the other, and then click Keep or Delete depending on whether
you want to leave the photos on your camera or not.Notalldate-
andtimestamps
onphotosare
correct– for
example,if
youscanin
oldfamily
historyphotos.
edittheseby
selectingthe
photoand
choosingphotos
>adjustDate
andtime.tick
‘Modifyoriginal
files’toamend
theactualfile
datestamp.