Linux Rant

Really the biggest issue I have with Ubuntu Linux right now is photography support. it's scattered and kinda sucky. photography has a workflow to it. you have your app to import and organize your photos. ideally that same app allows you to tag them into "like" and "suck" categories (among others) and it should allow you to edit the images as well. finally that app also needs to have some type of exporting tools that let you pick out your selection of likes and export them out to another location resized, renamed or both. extra points goes out to an application that has the ability to edit raw files and convert them to jpg with clear and understandable controls. finally you need another application where you can do really serious stuff, like Photoshop.

Linux has a "photoshop" called The GIMP. it doesn't do everything that Photoshop does but it's pretty damn good as far as open source stuff goes. there are things about Photoshop that i like better and one of the biggest things is just the user interface itself - much more sensible and useable. user interface is big. you can make an amazing application but if the interface sucks no body is going to actually enjoy using it. i know tons of people love GIMP but to me the multiple floating windows is annoying. i like to maximize my working image to use as much desktop as i can and in GIMP those stupid toolboxes hover over the image and it drives me nuts because i always have to move them out of the way.

As for the first app - Linux doesn't have it (at least not open source). What happens in Linux is you get 3 apps that all do parts of what i'm talking about needing to do and not as well as something like Adobe Lightroom. Adobe Lightroom is an amazing application for dealing with photos. you can have a folder full of jpgs, tifs, raw files, and all other common image types and Lightroom allows you to browse them all at once and work with them all seamlessly. you can group them into collections and export them all out at once with control over the output file type, quality, image dimensions, and file naming conventions. if something isn't working out how you want within Lightroom you can right-click to open in Photoshop and it'll make a copy of the image file, apply the lightroom adjustments and open that in Photoshop. you can do your thing in Photoshop, save, close it and back in Lightroom your photoshop edited image is right there ready to go. it's all so well thought out and functional. when you're dealing with 100's or thousands of images (as it was after our Alaska cruise) you really come to appreciate an easy to deal with workflow environment such as this. i had been using Linux for about 7 months straight up to that point and since then i've been using Windows again because of this.

so why not just work in a windows install within Vmware Workstation? because the performance sucks for dealing with massive image files and when the vm is doing big processing it brings down the entire Linux system making the computer just a little frustrating to deal with. When I merge a panorama from several images, for example, i've seen Windows beef up to using nearly 20GB of HD as swap and the resulting image is over 100MB in size. doing that in a VM is crazy and it would probably just crash since the VM doesn't have all those native resources that the host OS does. Why not just dual boot and do photography in Windows? this isn't actually a bad idea but I need a larger hard drive first. this was how i made it for 7 months before the vacation using Linux as my main OS. however my 160GB drive gets loaded up too quickly between the two OSs. i might go back to this setup again when i can go buy this 350GB 7200RPM drive they have at Best Buy.

i guess another issue is when photo management and editing crosses over into web development and my dev world is in Linux while my photo world is in windows. that's when i have to use the photo tools in a VM and i get frustrated again.

we'll see - i seem to switch back and forth every few days and now that i have my web projects in an svn repo on my server it makes it even easier to switch back and forth without losing track of things. i was going strong with Linux this week but then i attempted to edit a batch of photos from my camera and i was instantly frustrated. it's a sad thing. i'd like to fight for it and get used to using the Linux tools but why does it have to be like that? why can't the Linux tools work better or have more sensible/functional layouts to them?

(posted from Windows Vista)