What is good photo editing software for Linux

Last updated on September 1, 2020 by Dan Nanni

Photo editing software is often used by professional photographers as well as amateur shooters to add various enhancements to pictures taken with a camera. Especially with the growing popularity of digital photography nowadays, a good photo editor is almost a necessity if you are into photography.

In this post, I will cover popular photo editing software tools on Linux. All listed photo editing programs are free for use, and yet boast of comprehensive and powerful retouch, repair, transformation and metadata functions expected by serious photographers. Besides such commonly available photo editing functions, they also have some other notable features which I mention in the list.

1. Darktable

• Fully non-destructive editing on photo image data
• Export to Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, and standalone HTML
• GPU acceleration via OpenCL
• Tethered camera shooting
• Darktable official website

2. digiKam

• On-the-fly auto-transformations during picture downloading
• Extendable image processing plugins via Kipi (KDE Image Plugin Interface)
• Support for face detection and recognition
• Support for image versioning
• digiKam official website

3. Fotoxx

• Handy thumbnail browser with multiple thumbnail sizes
• Batch functions for renaming and tagging
• Support for HDR panorama stitching and processing
• Fotoxx official website

4. F-Spot

• Support for more than a dozen image formats and vendor-specific RAW formats
• Export to Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, standalone HTML and CD
• F-Spot official website

5. GIMP

• Customizable modular interface
• Support for various input hardware controller (e.g., USB/mouse wheel, keyboard, tablet) to speed up workflow actions
• Gimp official website

6. Photivo

• Non-destructive 16-bit processing
• Integration with GIMP's workflow mechanism (e.g., import from Photivo and export to Photivo via plugin)
• Photivo official website

7. Rawstudio

• RAW image processing program with 32-bit floating point processing engine
• Tethered camera shooting
• Export to GIMP
• Batch uploading for Picasa Web Albums, Flickr and Facebook.
• Automatic photo improvements (e.g., dead/stuck pixel removal) and lens correction
• Rawstudio official website

8. RawTherapee

• RAW image processing program specializing in RAW image formats from digital cameras
• 32-bit floating point processing engine
• RawTherapee official website

9. Shotwell

• Dynamically extended functionality via plugins
• Photo organizer interface with photo versioning
• Export to Flickr, Facebook and Picasa Web Albums
• Shotwell official website

10. UFRaw

• RAW image processing program specializing in RAW image formats from digital cameras
• Available as both standalone program and GIMP plugin
• Comes with command line batch processing utility
• UFRaw official website

If you have tried any of the software tools in the list, feel free to share your experience here. Also, if there is any missing photo editing software that you think needs to be included in the list, suggest it via comments.

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