Yorba announced today that Shotwell, their flagship photo organizer software, will become a lossless-only photo manager with the upcoming release of version 0.13.
Lossless-only means support for legacy image formats such as JPEG will be dropped, a forward-looking move Yorba founder Adam Dingle praised as “position[ing] Shotwell a generation ahead of competing photo management solutions.”
Upon installation, Shotwell 0.13 will upconvert the user’s existing JPEG image files to the lossless DNG format.
Users requiring additional space for their upconverted photos will be directed to a site where they may purchase a new hard drive. A percentage of proceeds from these purchases will fund Shotwell development.
Yorba is confident that this is a positive step for photo management.
“Think of it this way,” said Shotwell lead developer Lucas Beeler, “If I bought a four terabyte hard drive but only used two terabytes, I’d be wasting half the drive. Free space equals wasted money, which means Shotwell 0.13 users will get more out of their computers than they did with Shotwell 0.12.”
As Yorba’s Jim Nelson wrote on a blog post, “As a Gnome application, our goal is simplicity. Dropping support for legacy formats such as JPEG is one step toward that goal.”
I particularly concur with the last sentence, “As a Gnome application, our goal is simplicity. Dropping support for legacy formats such as JPEG is one step toward that goal.”
Well played, Jim Nelson. Well played. : )
The next step toward our goal for simplicity is to drop all photo file formats: TIFF, RAW, PNG, all of ’em.
No photo file formats, no photos, no problems.
Well then, thanks for your support until now, it’s time to change for another photo manager 🙁
Loved the April Fools joke, guys! 🙂
Looking forward to trying out the new features in 0.12… I’ve been following your work for quite some time, and right now I’m using Shotwell 0.10 as my sole photo organiser. Keep up the good work!
Nice try!
Huzzah! Shotwell users will surely celebrate this change, for they will lose nothing losing lossy formats.
You got me! lol
Will .gif still be supported? Without .gif support I’ll have to use digiKam, which is soooooo much simpler in use… but does just as much as Shotwell!
These jokes are a bit dangerous to yourselves. You may wish to consider clearly marking such articles as April Fool’s day jokes after April 1 has passed. Someone who isn’t aware of the custom, or who didn’t think to check the date, may simply swear off your app and immediately uninstall it after reading this article. That was my first thought before thinking to check the date. 🙂
Definitely agree. I almost didn’t realize it’s a joke now.
so do I but after a minute i got it reading the date =)
Yes, I also went straight to Wikipedia to see if there’s some global trend of abandoning JPEG happening without my knowledge 😛
After all the silly things you read about SOPA, PIPA, Apple decisions to sue other “App Stores” etc. you get used to some weird decisions being brought by people.