Linux for Photography
Image management: Shotwell
From "not on the map" 3 years ago, Shotwell is now the "de facto" image manager on (Fedora, Ubuntu and other) Linux. The first thing that strikes you when you fire it is a very nice image dispay - handy since displaying photos is Shotwell's first job - allowing a seamless zoom of your images from stamp size to a quarter of your screen.
Shotwell gives you what you would expect from an image manager: you can access your images via tagging, rating (both added as metadata to your files, of course) or events (by default one event per day, but you can rename events and drag-n-drop photos).
Shotwell also comes in with some nifty helpful features - like modifying the shooting time of pictures in batch relative to a certain periode of time (very handy when my ageing *istDS was dating all pictures starting from January 1, 2005). Shotwell also allows you to publish your pictures to facebook, flickr or picasa - but not PPG, thank God. It shows a diaporama from any search (tags, events, rating). Since version 0.11, tags can (at last) be organized in folders and Shotwell is apparently able to import RAW+JPG and consider both files as one image.
All in all, Shotwell does the job and does it well: lots of ways to sort, class and search through your images, beautiful way to display them, everything is done in the images metadata. The only thing which puzzles me with Shotwell is why does it want to edit my images (red eyes removal, basic histogram modification or even a magic "enhance" thingie)? Well the good thing is that you don't need to use it and also that Shotwell does the right thing about it: it doesn't overwrite (and degrade) your jpg file without telling you - it saves another copy.
So something that was very much a work in progress 3 years ago (especially the tagging and metadata) is now a "no brainer" thanks to Shotwell, a program that, by the way, saw its first mailing list entry in June 2009.