Shotwell is an awesome image organizer. However, there is no Windows port. Shotwin reads a Shotwell database and provides a user interface similar to Shotwell:
The target platform is Windows, but (at least currently) it is as cross-platform as Qt is. The idea behind it is simple
- Copy Shotwell's database and all the files in it's database to a readable location on Windows.
- Add as many path mappings as needed in the Settings dialog. E.g.,
/home/osse/Picture;E:/shotwell
makes Shotwell attempt to find images underE:/shotwell
when it encounters a path starting with/home/osse/Pictures
in the database. This is in fact the only mapping I personally need, but you can add as many as you want. They are tried in order. - Enjoy! (Potentially after restarting)
I've Shotwell for several years. But the last couple of years Windows has been my most-used desktop OS at home. Firstly, it because tedious to either use a Virtual Machine or reboot to look at my pictures. Secondly, I wanted to familiarize myself with some aspects of Qt I wasn't all that familiar with, in particular Qt's Model/View Framework and QML. Thus, Shotwin was born.
It is not meant as a fork of or generally competitor to Shotwell. Neither is it meant to be a port of Shotwell. It is simply a program that uses a Shotwell database.
Currently, Shotwin has the following basic features of Shotwell:
- Events organized in a tree, with event names or dates,
- file system tree of photo locations (does not current use the mapping describe above),
- tags list,
- basic view of events or photos within an event, when using the left-hand side trees,
- display rating and tags when viewing photos
- "fullscreen" photos with keyboard navigation.
It does not support:
- image transformations,
- searching,
- modification (importing photos etc.),
- modifiable sorting,
- nice rounded corners in the list of events,
- and just about everything else.
Some quirks:
- The GUI design looks very bland for a modern app. This has been far down on my list priorities, so don't hold your breath.
- Localized dates everywhere, but otherwise English language used in the GUI.
- No nice rounded corners in the list of events.
However, it does:
- Show thumbnails of videos!
- Play videos without using an external player!
Shotwin is written in C++ with Qt and has no other compile time dependencies. The build system is CMake. If you are familiar with CMake building should be straight-forward. I have successfully built it with both Qt as provided by MSYS2 and the official installer.
To make thumbnailing of videos work, you need ffmpeg
, and it must either be
in %PATH%
or you can set the path to it in the settings. To make video
playback work, you need...