Regular readers of this blog are probably aware that I am a happy user of the Linux operating system, and have been for several years. It's just great to be able to use an operating system that is secure, free of viruses and generally less bug-ridden than the more popular OS.
There are some minor inconveniences- not every Windows app runs on Linux. On the other hand, for most general purpose computer applications there are some excellent Linux apps.
When I got my new camera a couple of weeks ago, I discovered gThumb. It was already on my computer as it's pretty much a standard GNOME application. In the past I had ignored it but I decided to give it a go.
Here's what happens.
You plug your camera into the USB plug on the computer. Gthumb loads, checks what type of camera it is and installs the drivers. It then looks at the photos on your camera card and display them. It asks if you want to download them onto the computer, giving you a number of choices, such as whether to delete them from the camera and whether to retain the arbitrary name given by the camera to each photo.
It automatically loads them into a directory named by the current date and time, giving you a unique location for your photos, and an indication of when they were taken. After you've done that, there is a huge number of possibilities. View your photos at full-screen, move them to another location, tag them, do simple adjustments to the image. The rename facility is brilliant- if you want o rename all your photos "holiday01.jpg" "holiday02.jpg" etc, it lets you select the photos to rename and then enter a template- in this case you would enter holiday##.jpg and presto, they all get changed automatically.
Brilliant! A very simple to use and very useful little application.
A good photo program can't be beat. I used Picasa when I was using windows and just loved it - picassa - not windows. My MAC has iPhoto which really sucks in comparison. Picasa let me email and blog photos directly, but iPhoto forces you to go through the MAC email which I don't care to pay for since I have Opera for free. iPhoto seems very slow and cumbersome.
ReplyDeleteHere's some good news for you Lois. From wikipediaMac OS XPicasa for Mac is under development and will be launched later in 2008.[14] For now, Picasa Web Albums is available for Macs. A plugin is available for iPhoto to upload to the Picasa Web Albums hosting service. There is also a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploading tools for OS X 10.4 or later. Using Darwine or similar compatibility layers, however, Picasa can run on Mac OS X.I thought it was already ported to Mac. They do have a linux version available.
ReplyDeleteThat's great news. I've been checking periodically since they told me something might be coming soon, didn't realize it was that close. Thanks for the good news!
ReplyDelete