Fotowall is a small application that allows you to make collages from your photos and export the result to use as a wallpaper on your desktop.

In this article I’m going to show the benefits of storing the photos in RAW “format”. I’ll be also decribing GNU/Linux tools that can help you with processing such images.

Compared to powerful and feature-rich photo applications like F-Spot and digiKam, Fotox looks decidedly underpowered. But while Fotox is no match to those powerhouses featurewise, this lightweight tool can come in handy when you have to perform basic photo editing fast and with minimum fuss.

I had been using digikam for several years to manage my collection of digital photographs. With the recent purchase of a new DSLR (my first I might add), I was looking to see what else was out there in the terms of software, functionality, features, costs, etc. At the same time, while looking on the net to see what was available, I found many people looking for the same things as I. There was also a lot of mis-information out there. Due to the popularity of our Ultimate Linux Guides to ....I decided to create this one.

GNOME will detect an iPhone or iPod Touch as a camera, and ask you if you want to import pictures every time it’s plugged in.

F-Spot is a graphical photo manager that allows you to tag your image files and search and view images based on those tags. With phpfspot, you can share the photo collection you manage with F-Spot with others through a Web interface and let them navigate through your photos using the tags you have set up.

Virtually any photo manager lets you perform mundane tasks like adjusting contrast, adding a watermark, and applying effects to your photos. But even powerful applications like digiKam and F-Spot can't really help you when you need to perform the same action (or a sequence of actions) on dozens or hundreds of photos. For that you need a batch processing utility like Phatch. This nifty tool can perform no fewer than 35 different actions on your photos, and its user-friendly graphical interface makes it easy to create advanced multistep batch rules.

Photo buffs who are fond of open source software would do well to look at blueMarine. Right now, the free, cross-platform application's strength is image management, but it is on its way to becoming a complete workflow tool. Its cataloging features are robust, its architecture is extensible, and it takes some intriguing new approaches.

Phatch is a simple to use cross-platform GUI Photo Batch Processor which handles all popular image formats and can duplicate (sub)folder hierarchies. Phatch can batch resize, rotate, rename, … and more in minutes instead of hours or days if you do it manually. Phatch will also support a console version in the future to batch photos on webservers.

Services like Flickr and Picasa seems like an obvious way to share your photos with the world. But if you are the do-it-yourself type and prefer to share your photos from the convenience of your own server, give Pixelpost a try. This MySQL/PHP-based application allows you to publish a photoblog and tweak it any way you like. Better yet, you can extend Pixelpost's functionality via addons, so you can turn your basic photoblog into a powerful photo publishing platform.

Even the most basic digital cameras can store a lot of useful information about photos in the EXIF format, including exposure time, aperture settings, focal length, and metering mode. The EXIF metadata can also contain the photo's geographical coordinates, which provide the exact position of where the photo was taken, but only few cameras on the market support this feature.

Photo management software for Windows makes us weep. For most people, photo management consists of loading the software (and drivers) that came from the camera manufacturer. So you've got a Nikon camera, and the photo management software is really different from your significant other's Kodak software.

Combining multiple photographs taken at different exposures lets you create a single image with good highlight and shadow detail. Tone-mapping applications like Qtpfsgui are the traditional way to do this, but tone-mapping is slow, difficult to use, and can produce strange visual artifacts. A new tool on the scene is easier, faster, and produces nicer results: Enfuse.

Photo mosaics are recreations of one large image composed of tiny tiles of other smaller images. They can be a fun project and make good use of the hundreds of less-than-extraordinary photos on your hard drive. We compared three easy-to-use Linux-based utilities for generating photo mosaics -- Pixelize, Metapixel, and Imosaic -- on speed, quality, and other factors.

Whether by wind, vibration, or shaky hand, we have all taken blurry photos. But in the digital era, there is no need to despair -- you can remove shake and blur from your pictures after the fact. Several Linux-friendly utilities can help you.

We all know the right way to sort photos is to do them right after you take them. We also know that doing a disk backup before your drive fails is the right way to do backups. But, we don't always do things the right way. Enter my situation. I have close to 10,000 photos takes with my digital camera over the last seven years.

We reviewed the RAW photo editor LightZone almost a year ago, when the Linux version of the product was a closed source -- but free -- download. After months of updates only for the Mac OS X and Windows versions of the application, Light Crafts has released a new beta for Linux. It is a substantial improvement -- but it also marks the end of the road for the free edition.

If you're finding DigiKam or F-Spot, two of the many photo organization and editing tools for Linux, a bit limiting you may want to give Lightzone a try. The software isn't free, and curiously, isn't available for purchase either, but judging by the 20-day demo version currently available, it could end up a serious contender in the hybrid photo editing/managing market.

In the photography world, a prominent proprietary file format is Kodak's Photo CD (.PCD). Once the premiere format for film scanning, it is now a difficult-to-work-around relic. Recently I set out to resurrect some old PCD images on a Linux system -- a challenge that serves as an object lesson in the importance of open standards in any kind of digital archive.