Importing images with GNOME Photos

GNOME Photos is an application for browsing, editing and organizing photos. Organizing photos just became a lot faster now that Photos supports importing directly from SD cards and connected cameras.

First, install Photos  with either GNOME Software, or by using dnf along with sudo:

sudo dnf install gnome-photos

However, as of Fedora 28 Workstation, Photos is already installed!

Importing photos

After connecting the digital camera or inserting the SD card, open Photos. A notification appears at the top of the window identifying the camera detected. Click Import…

Select the photos to import, or click “Select items for import” to toggle select all or select none. Once selected, click Select.

Next, either select an existing album or create a new album for the imported photos.

That’s it! The album should now be populating with photos. If a lot of photos were selected, it could take a while to copy everything. Photos doesn’t store files in a special database. When Photos creates a new album, it creates a corresponding directory inside ~/Pictures.

More improvements to GNOME Photos

Editing photos is now faster too. Photos uses an image processing library called GEGL to load, edit and export files. As a result of some improvements to GEGL, decoding images with embedded orientation in them is now 15 times faster than the previous version!

In addition to the exposure and black level adjustments, Photos can now adjust shadows and highlights. Be sure to check out the previous article for an introduction to the editing tools.

Many more features were added to GNOME Photos in 3.28. See the project’s roadmap for more details.

Fedora Project community

5 Comments

  1. dragonbite

    I’m curious, though, when importing from a camera does Photos remember what has been imported before, or do you have to manually keep track of that or delete all of the photos afterwards?

    Glad to see Photos getting updates.

  2. dragonbite

    Question: when choosing an import location does it allow you to use a directory structure?

    For example, if I put in “photos/2018-05-11” for the album, will it put the pictures selected to import into ~/Pictures/photos/2018-05-11/ ?

    I ask because I split up my pictures as /Pictures/Photos, /Pictures/Graphics, /Pictures/Wallpapers, etc.

  3. Matt Kunkel

    Liking the latest update to GNOME Photos, glad it’s default on Fedora 28! CSD + Simplicity for the win!

    I’m unable to find any information on color management (neither documentation nor roadmap lists it). Does this automatically come to the party with GTK3? I’m still using geeqie for my workflow as I know it displays true to print.

    • FeRDNYC

      Well, it’s funny you should ask, especially since you also mention print.

      Photos, at present, has absolutely no awareness of color profiles. Doesn’t read or process the embedded profile data in images. Doesn’t allow management of profiles, conversions between profiles, heck the WORD “profile” doesn’t appear anywhere in the source code — not one single time. /Perhaps/ embedded profiles are just automatically applied when displaying images onscreen, but even that’s unclear.

      But perhaps, like me, you’re thinking: Wait, even if that does cover onscreen display, Photos also has the ability to print images. It’s impossible to have a fully automatic, color-managed professional print workflow. You’ll want to have some sort of soft proofing, and (in the most exacting cases) you have to select a color profile matched to the specific PAPER you’re printing on, in order to get the most precise, color-accurate output possible.

      Well, Photos currently is not able to provide any of that. However, neither does Geeqie. (It does allow management and selection of color profiles used for image display, but not any soft proofing or output profile selection, the way you’d find in a commercial color-managed press workflow. Which I admit is probably too high a standard to hold Photos, or Geeqie or any general-audience image software, to.)

      So, if Geeqie works well enough for you, Photos may as well, especially if your printer setup in Gnome is applying a printer color profile already. (My older Brother MFC shows a “Printer Profile” line in the Color tab of the print dialog, but it is not an editable field and it always reads “Unavailable”. There does not seem to be a way to convince Gnome 3 to use a color profile when outputting to my printer.)

      I realize I haven’t answered your central question, “DOES Photos at least use embedded color profiles when displaying images?” That’s simply because I honestly do not know. If so, it happens (as you suggested) automatically as a function of the underlying image-display libraries, because there is no code in Photos to handle any aspect of color-management whatsoever.

  4. choubi79

    Unfortunately, it seems “gnome-photo” is not able to import RAW files yet while other application like “shotwell” can do it.

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