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Picking Up Shotwell Development

 

Hey Team,

I’ve been talking to Jim Nelson (President of Yorba) about Shotwell for a
while now and here’s the quick and dirty: Shotwell needs a new maintainer.
Ubuntu has the Gallery app, Fedora has GNOME photos, and Yorba just doesn’t
have the resources anymore to maintain Shotwell. Their focus is on Geary.
So that pretty much leaves us or an unknown to take up the mantel.

Jim seems really excited about the idea of Shotwell becoming a part of our
community. He thinks we have the talent and the vision to bring it up to
date and make it into a really great app. But there’s a small caveat: Yorba
recently joined the GNOME development community. So officially, development
is done in GNOME git and bugzilla and their wiki, etc. Which is obviously
not ideal for us.

Enter the solution: After some discussion with Jim, we think the best
course of action is for elementary to fork Shotwell. I’ve taken the liberty
of setting up a launchpad page for Pantheon
Photos<https://launchpad.net/pantheon-photos>.
It is currently maintained by elementary-apps team, but I think we’ll want
to create a Pantheon Photos team as Jim wants to stay in the loop on
development, but we don’t want to spam him with all the other elementary
apps stuff.

Firstly, I know that this is a big responsibility to take on. I think as a
community, we can do it. Having Photos in launchpad and under the umbrella
of the elementary apps team will allow us a lot more freedom for casual
involvement with the code base. Not to mention, Jim has already stated that
he is available to answer anyone’s questions or give guidance regarding how
Shotwell’s code is structured, things to watch out for, etc.

I think this is going to be a really positive move for our photos app and
I’m looking forward to working with all of you on building a really great
Photos experience in elementary OS.

-- 
Best Regards,

Daniel Foré

elementaryos.org

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