Solang

Are you looking for a photo manager? Then Solang might be an alternative you’d like to check out. Not everyone’s happy about F-spot even if it is full of features. We all have our preferences and it’s not an essentially bad thing to search for options.

Solang seems to have a problem with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope so those who want to use it already might be better off with upgrading to Karmic Koala first. There’s a PPA for Solang but those who are not familiar with it might be turned off. I personally plan to upgrade before I try Solang.

The feature list as written by Santanu several months ago. I am thinking this would be applicable for Solang on Karmic.

• Paginated views for memory and speed efficiency (in git already)
• Icon zooming in browser view (in git already)
• Undoable delete feature for tags and photos (partially in git)
• Undoable basic editing (flip/rotate/scale) (underway)
• Batch editing of pictures (hopefully) (TBD)
• An importer from flickr (Underway)
• A basic exporter that exports selected photos to a directory (hopefully through a basic editing pipeline) (TBD)

It looks interesting especially with the screenshots on this blog entry about compiling Solang in Ubuntu.

Solang is one of the applications I want to try once I upgrade to Karmic Koala because I am still trying to find which application works best for me. At least when it comes to managing a photo collection offline. I’ve settled for Postr when it comes to importing photos since I mainly use Flickr rather than Picasa or Photobucket. If I uploaded images to other online image sharing sites then I might be sold on using F-spot. And I find F-spot a bit slow even if it is useful. Hopefully Solang will be a better option. If not Solang, there’s also Phraymd to take a look at.