Although there aren’t many image editors for the Gnome users to use, all of the available are quite powerful. Gimp, Darktable and Fotoxx are some examples.
Fotoxx has released version 12.10 a few days ago and I decided that now is a good time to test-use this powerful application and present to you what it does and what it doesn’t.
What Fotoxx is good at
Collection
First of all, Fotoxx will search the folders you want and add your photographs in its collection. You can navigate and choose any image for editing just by clicking it. Going from the editor to the collection browser is again one click away (tabs on the top left). The collection browser is fast and responsive even for huge collections that contain large files. You can also search by name or even by a geotag!
Editing
The editing abilities of this application are many and some of them are quite special. The GUI design of the editor is completely simple and understandable, and everything is categorized correctly. You simply choose what you want to do from one of the menus on the top and then tune the various factors of the effect in the same way you would do in Gimp.
You can do simple editing like cropping, scaling, invert image, change color balance etc or do more advanced things. As screenshots always show more than words I will present some of the most advanced effects/tools that you can use on Fotoxx in the following images.
These are just some examples of what you can do with Fotoxx. You can do a lot more like completely removing objects from a picture, combine images to create a panorama, unbend pictures to fix perspective problems, add artistic effects etc.
What Fotoxx isn’t good at
- There are many reports about crashes from users that tried to do HDR processing.
- Not many exporting options. You can export to png, jpeg, bmp and tif. If these are enough for you then you’ll have no problem…
- Although there are seven artistic effects available, I think there could/should be more to please users.
- Some effects could use more factors in order to be more precise.
- Right click could do things like copy/cut/paste etc instead of just offering the only option to “copy image to clipboard”
- Some simple tools like “select” should be out like as a button or something instead of staying under a menu.
- What’s the deal with plugins? I don’t know :(
Conclusion
There is nothing that will offer everything to everyone and there will never be such a thing no matter what. Fotoxx isn’t an exception. It is good for some things and bad for other purposes. In my mind, Fotoxx is distinguished for doing the complicated task of photo editing as simple as it can be for the user. You should try it and see if it works for your needs!
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