Thursday, September 27, 2012

ToyViewer and Seashore Alternative for Linux

Everybody's heard of Photoshop and GIMP, but what if you want to do a quick photo edit, like a quick sharpen or gamma correction, without having to open a massive application that takes forever to load? In OS X, you could always choose ToyViewer and Seashore, two lightweight and deceptively powerful photo editors, for such occasions. But what about Linux? Besides the GIMP, what is there? There are photo browsers like gThumb and Mirage that have very rudimentary editing capabilities, but ToyViewer and Seashore offered much more. This is where Fotoxx comes in. Fotoxx is a lightweight, fast, and feature-rich photo editor that offers all the basics and more without making you stare at a splash screen all day or trying to navigate your way around a myriad of window panes.

Fotoxx

The features are too long to list here, but you can see some of them in the menu above. For a full list you can visit their website. There's a bit of a, I wouldn't call it a learning curve, but more an adjustment period. The menu options aren't listed in a traditional way and it takes a minute to find what you're looking for at first, but once you get over that, it's a great tool to have. The only caution I have is that it wants to index all your photos on first launch. This can take awhile if you have a ton, but it's supposed to bring you fast search results of meta tags. If you have no need for this, you can always point the indexer to a subfolder with few or no pictures in it (i.e., not ~/Pictures) when you first run it. There's a brand new version that makes indexing optional, but the Debian Wheezy version is a tad older.

Have fun cropping and embossing!

1 comment:

  1. Keep the Linux stuff coming Dan! I see it as a natural progression of sorts as 10.4 continues to lose developers and web standards march on.

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