Gnome Image Organizer

Gnome is a free software system that provides a desktop and a set of applications that run on it. The desktop environment includes an object request broker supporting the Common Object Request Broker Architecture so that programs on different operating systems can interact with each other. It also includes a window manager, a set of widgets and other utilities. Gnome is available as a complete desktop with an integrated application suite, or as a base for a more customizable experience on other operating systems.

GNOME has a long history of being a leader in free and open source software. GNOME’s first release was in 1998, and it quickly gained popularity for its clean interface and features. It has a reputation for providing high-quality, stable software with a strong emphasis on usability and security. Its user community is very active, and it is supported by a large group of volunteers. GNOME is used by millions of users worldwide, including a wide range of students and faculty at universities.

In medieval European folklore, a gnome is a dwarfish goblin or earth spirit that guards mines of precious treasures hidden beneath the ground. Gnomes are often depicted as small, physically deformed creatures with gnarled or bushy eyebrows and a long beard. They are sometimes portrayed as melancholic and unlucky, but they can be helpful if approached with respect.

The GNOME Project maintains a variety of open-source image management and editing tools. One of these is the Shotwell image organizer, which offers a simple and intuitive way to organize photos and videos. Shotwell can import images from a camera, create thumbnails and folders for them, and perform basic image manipulation such as rotation and cropping. It can also automatically download and update metadata for the files it manages.

The Shotwell team is proud to announce that it has won a favorable decision in its fight against a patent claim brought by the Rothschild Patent Institute (RPI). RPI claimed that GNOME’s open-source Shotwell image organizer infringed on their 2008 “Image Capture System with Data Transmission” patent. The patent is widely regarded as overly broad and invalid, and GNOME’s friends at the Open Invention Network (OIN), the pro-Linux patent non-aggression consortium, and the law firm Shearman & Sterling came to GNOME’s aid in fighting it.

Among other things, the Shotwell team has been working on improving its support for color adjustments to improve photo quality. The latest version of the application adds a number of new options for tweaking things like exposure and contrast.

Another improvement is that Shotwell now tries to make sure that a thumbnail accurately represents the current state of an item. In order to do this, it tracks edits in a file and serializes them separately from the original. This information is then applied to the thumbnail. Unfortunately, the original file and the thumbnail are often created at different times, and the metadata of the original does not necessarily get updated when the thumbnail is updated. This was a bug that was introduced in an earlier version of the application, and it will be fixed in Shotwell 3.28.