Google just released my favorite photo manager for linux. It’s not native-linux, which is a bummer, since it could probably be a bit quicker if it was. It uses an ’emulator’ called WINE.

There were two choices for photo management in linux: f-spot and digikam. I’ve never used digikam, since it’s a kde-based app, and I’m a gnome fanboy. I hear it’s got lots of nice plugins and such, which picasa will probably never have, since it’s not open-sourced. I really don’t need much from my software except to allow me to view all my photos in one nice location, and do some basic editing. For this, f-spot would be great, except for a couple short-comings.

It doesn’t import things as nicely as picasa. If I import my whole collection all at once, it’s not very well organized, and I have to go through and tag things. I already have all my pictures organized, and don’t want to have to do it again. In this respect, picasa comes out on top. Picasa also auto-imports new pictures, which makes me very happy. I can tell it exactly which folders to keep an eye on, and it does the rest. F-spot also wants to copy all my pictures to the Photos folder, which isn’t where I want them. It’s an especially bad idea, since it would make duplicates, as they already exist on my hard drive. If I uncheck the box for that option, it comes back the same way next time, which is trivial, but if you forget that, you’re in big trouble. You’ll have to go through and find the pictures (hope you tagged them) and remove them, and try the import all over again. F-spot also has problems if I try to import my whole collection at once. Picasa didn’t complain at all, and did it very quickly.

For other people, f-spot or digikam may be perfect. For me, picasa is the only one to use.