Frequently Asked Questions

Please read through these common questions and answers before emailing the mailing list.

Please do email the mailing list if you want to change or add items to this page. Thank you!

Why write yet another photo manager? F-Spot, GThumb, J-Brout, Shotwell, etc. rock.

In our opinion none of them integrate well with the desktop. They need you to explicitly import photos from a directory and any meta-data that you add (mainly tags) get inserted into their private database. We do not do that anymore. We use Tracker for these purposes. It allows us to automatically detect all the photos on your computer and any meta-data that is added gets inserted into Tracker. So if you tag your photos in Solang, you can use those tags from any other application on the desktop (eg., Nautilus), and vice versa.

Sure, we could have changed an existing application, but F-Spot (the most common) is sometimes too heavy and we do not know C#; Shotwell started around the same time as Solang and since they are on the "private database" path we believe they took an informed decision and are less likely to change; and finally we wanted to explore the GNOME stack and learn some C++ on the way.

At the end of the day, not everyone might like to use Tracker as the meta-data store and we believe there is a place for such programs as well.

C++? C, C#, Python, Vala are so much better.

Sure they are, but then we wanted to see how bad C++ really is.

Please try to avoid flaming the lists or channels with mindless and fanatical rants. If you have something thoughtful and interesting to say, we are always eager to listen.