XnView Software

This is my use case:
My friends and I have several cameras: phones, tablets, and DSLRs from which we might share photos of some event.
Different photos taken on different devices may have the same name, so they are kept in different folders.
We'd like to be able to group these photos from the same event for slideshows, sharing, and whatnot while preserving the device folder they came from.

Event groups seem to have been created by Apple, but other photo managers, Shotwell, for example, do this acceptably. Shotwell, though, is very slow, especially on startup. That's what led me here. Shotwell is the place many start from since it is the default photo manager for Ubuntu. To replace Shotwell for me, XnView needs at least the event grouping feature. Linux users certainly go looking for better software when exposed to Shotwell, so I could see a much larger user base for XnView if it had event grouping and possibly other features of Shotwell. Not every feature would really be useful, though. I find a LOT of Linux (and many Windows) people use GIMP for editing, so the editing features of photo managers often go unnoticed. I'm looking for organizational, browsing, and presentation features; so the quest continues.

I agree!

I'm looking for a simple way to organize all the photos I my family has taken. Currently I'm using Shotwell but I'm not perfectly happy with it: the interface is a bit chunky and so is the workflow. One thing I appreciate though is the event or calendar view of my photos.

I would take it a step further though. Much like XnViewMP has configurable labels for Important, Personal, etc. I would also add configurable time-ranges, like the seasons (Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring), holiday periods (Christmas, Easter, etc.), Day/Night/Morning/Evening, and perhaps others I can't think of now. Those should be filters that can quickly be applied - or Categories that are automatically added.

One thing that Shotwell and XnViewMP are both missing (but Digikam has) is a geographical or location view of photos. Personally I don't travel that much is it not super useful but the idea is intriguing - even just for local trips if I zoom into my little region of the planet.

Thanks,

One thing that Shotwell and XnViewMP are both missing (but Digikam has) is a geographical or location view of photos.

Try Tools | Open GPS location in ... - it works?

About Calendars/Events/Time based organization:

For this to work, first it is needed at least to save in DB the Digitized Date Time in a separate field. This is easy by itself but in order to be done properly it needs to be done for all the metadata fields (ok, for the most used ones). An extensive discussion was held here on forums.

Besides that, a next step would involve a Date/Time manager in order to allow us to filter/select the desired photos. This pane/window/interface etc. can be from a simple "From" -> "To" date/time pickers till customizations (which I also support) like this:

I would also add configurable time-ranges, like the seasons (Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring), holiday periods (Christmas, Easter, etc.), Day/Night/Morning/Evening, and perhaps others I can't think of now. Those should be filters that can quickly be applied...

For example, Zoner:
...or, much better, ACDSee:
...or, even better, Photo Timeline. Some examples of it:

http://hirmes.com/phototimeline/?ss=jam ... =1980&ni=4

http://hirmes.com/phototimeline/?ss=Ste ... =2000&ni=4

http://hirmes.com/phototimeline/?ss=And ... =2000&ni=4

Note: The Photo Timeline is just a display engine which sits on top of Google's search engine.

Easy to do and we can enhance this. More upon request.