Looking for a lite photo viewer for GNOME? Take a glance at Solang, which is now in alpha state. As developer Santanu Sinha, who wrote the application in C++, makes clear, we're not talking about a clone of F-spot written in Mono.

Both programs, F-Spot and Solang, have mutually exclusive features. As Sinhu says in his blog, his primary concern was speed: it should run on his "busted old laptop." As far as photo editing, he acknowledges that other programs do a better job of touching up RAW photos, such as RAWStudio, GIMP, or CinePaint.

Solang 0.1 currently imports and identifies photos from diverse directories and from cameras (via PTP). Users can tag these photos While downloading them and later on. Photo management based on file or content characteristics is possible and this through a rather attractive yet understated user interface, which also provides some basic editing capabilities.

What may not sound terribly exciting is simply that this is version 0.1. Version 0.2 is already in the plans, which should include paged views for a performance boost and a zoom function in browser view. The subsequent version should also provide batch editing and an undo feature for certain processing (turning, rotating and scaling). It should also provide exporting of selected photos to particular directories.

To test the Solang alpha version, download the code from a mirror site. Packages are also available for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic).

Looking for a lite photo viewer for GNOME? Take a glance at Solang, which is now in alpha state. As developer Santanu Sinha, who wrote the application in C++, makes clear, we're not talking about a clone of F-spot written in Mono.