Linux users who also has a photography hobby must have heard about Shotwell. It’s one of the best photo managers for Linux. The story of Shotwell began in 2010 when it replaced F-Spot as the default photo manager for several GNOME-based Linux distributions, including Ubuntu. Since then, the photo manager has transformed to become one of the best photo managers in Linux. Shotwell itself is released firstly in 2009.

The native function of Shotwell is basically to help you manage your photos on your computer to make them more organized. But, Shotwell also features several basic editing tools to allow you cropping the photos, straighten, eliminate red eye to adjust levels and color balance.

Before letting Shotwell to organize your photo collections sure the first thing you have to do is importing your photos from external sources like camera or external hard drive to your computer. Importing photos from external sources using Shotwell is as easy as slicing the bread. This article will show how to import photos directly from DSLR camera. No additional tools and software are required. All you need is a USB cable to connect your camera to your computer.

After the importing process has finished you will see several new folders with the name of year. Inside each folder you will also see several subfolders with the name of date. That’s how Shotwell works. It organizes your photos by grouping them by date taken.

Here is how to import photos from DSLR camera with Shotwell.

• Connect your DLSR camera to your computer using USB cable and launch Shotwell app in your computer (be sure to turn on your camera).
• You should see your camera model name appears on the side panel of Shotwell. Just click on it and wait until Shotwell finished loading the previews of photos.

• Press and hold the CTRL button while clicking the photos you want to import then click the Import Selected button.

• Or if you want to import all the photos then just click the Import All button at the bottom-right corner.

By now, you can access and organize your photos using Shotwell. In Shotwell, your photos are grouped in Events (as you can see on the side panel). You can do a lot of things on each photo like adding comment, title, tags, set the rating, open it on file manager and lots more. Have fun with your photos!

Note: If you meet any trouble during importing, try to unmount your camera