Sharing and cloud support
Making the fruits of your labour accessible to others.
here we’re bundling together two other important aspects of a good photo manager. First is support for photos stored on photo-sharing websites, and second is support for sharing your photos with individuals. While some of this can be achieved with no specific software support, built-in facilities do make life easier.
We could find no support for online sharing in either picty or Xnview MP. However, this conclusion was drawn only as a result of attempting to look through the various menus and controls, because the documentation is so limited for picty and nonexistent for Xnview MP. There is a menu entry called ‘Web capture’ in Xnview, but we couldn’t get it to do anything useful (sounds like it might be for capturing web pages? – Ed).
All the other packages support a variety of photo-sharing sites.
Gthumb is unique in providing import from Flickr. However, all can export to at least one site: Flickr and Facebook in the case of Shotwell; Flickr, Facebook and 23 with gthumb; and a large selection including Flicker and Facebook with digikam. If you want to host photos on a general website, a facility is provided by digikam and gthumb to generate an HTML page.
Moving on to sharing photos with individuals, both Shotwell and digikam can send a message with an attached photo if you can’t be bothered to open your email client yourself, although this requires an add-on for digikam.
Although not quite sharing in such an immediate way, it’s pertinent to point out that digikam, gthumb, Shotwell and Xnview
MP all provide a means of printing photos, either individually or as several on a page. Multiple image printing requires a plug-in with
digikam, however.