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.”