[Shotwell] Shotwell 0.5 Impressions of a New User

[Bruno Girin]

On Fri, 2010-06-18 at 11:49 -0500, Steven Stern wrote:
> On 06/17/2010 10:42 PM, Lu Timdale wrote:
> > I think this application shows the most promise from any linux based photo manager thus far.
> >
> 
> Overall, I'm pretty happy with Shotwell.  I think my major problem is
> that I've been collecting images for years and those images include .bmp
> and .gif files.  I know I can convert them to .jpg, but why should I
> have to?

If you have images in .gif or .bmp format, you'd be better off
converting them to .png rather than .jpg. The reason for this is
that .png uses a lossless compression algorithm, like .gif (.bmp doesn't
use compression so is by definition lossless too), while .jpg uses a
compression algorithm that can lead to unexpected artefacts in images
that have large areas of a single colour. In practice, such artefacts
are invisible on a photograph because images of real life never produce
large areas of a single colour but they can be very obvious on drawings
and icons.

As to why should you have to convert your images, the only reason I can
think of is that .bmp images are uncompressed so converting them to .png
would save disk space while not loosing any details.

Anyway, the perfect solution is Adam's one: add a ticket to Shotwell so
that when it is resolved, Shotwell will handle .gif and .bmp :-)

Bruno