A selection of Free/Libre Open Source Software projects related to photography.
The Free & Open Source Image Editor. This is the official website of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). GIMP is a cross-platform image editor available for GNU/Linux, OS X, Windows and more operating systems. It is free software, you can change its source code and distribute your changes. A selection of Free/Libre Open Source Software projects related to photography. For a newcomer (and some seasoned users) the number of different imaging projects can be a little overwhelming. The primary projects you will probably consider for general purpose photography will likely be a raw.
For a newcomer (and some seasoned users) the number of different imaging projects can be a little overwhelming. The primary projects you will probably consider for general purpose photography will likely be a raw processor and possibly pixel editing.
Commercial programs are mentioned here only as a point of reference for newcomers. None of these projects aspire to be like (or really care about) the commercial offerings.
A solid option for raw processing, library management, and reasonable replacement for the commercial Lightroom, would be either darktable or RawTherapee.
For pixel-editing and similar functionality to what you might find in Photoshop, GIMP is an awesome option (even awesomer when extended with the G’MIC plugin).
If you find we’re missing something please let us know in the forums!
Raw Processing
darktable Photography workflow application and raw processor.
RawTherapee A powerful cross-platform raw photo processing program.
UFRaw UFRaw is a utility to read and manipulate raw images from digital cameras. It can be used on its own or as a GIMP plug-in.
Photivo Photivo handles your raw files, as well as your bitmap files, in a non-destructive 16 bit processing pipeline.
Filmulator Streamlined raw management and editing application centered around a film-simulating tone mapping algorithm.
PhotoFlow Raw and raster image processor featuring non-destructive adjustment layers and 32-bit floating-point accuracy.
Lightzone LightZone is raw processing software that lets the user build up a stack of tools which can be rearranged and readjusted.
Web Galleries
coppermine gallery Coppermine is a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library with a MySQL backend.
fgallery fgallery is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. fgallery shows your photos, and nothing else.
Gallery Gallery is a web based software that lets you manage your photos on your own website.
No longer maintained.
MediaGoblinNo longer maintained.
MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.
myphotoshare myphotoshare is an open source web photo gallery aimed at sleekness and speed. It works over directory structures rather than esoteric photo database management software.
Pannellum Pannellum is a lightweight, free, and open source panorama viewer for the web. Built using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and WebGL, it is plug-in free.
Piwigo Piwigo is photo gallery software for the web, built by an active community of users and developers.
ResourceSpace ResourceSpace open source digital asset management software is the simple, fast, and free way to organise your digital assets
Zenphoto Zenphoto is a CMS for selfhosted, gallery focused websites. Our focus lies on being easy to use and having all the features there when you need them (but out of the way if you do not).
Pixel Editing
GIMP Cross platform pixel-editing software for photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.
Krita Digital painting and illustration application with CMYK support, HDR painting, G’MIC integration and more.
Imagemagick A software suite to create, edit, compose or convert images on the command line.
G’MIC Full featured framework for image processing with different user interfaces, including a GIMP plugin to convert, manipulate, filter, and visualize image data.
Hugin Panorama stitching and blending application.
LuminanceHDR Application to provide a workflow for HDR imaging, creation, and tone mapping.
HDRMerge HDRMerge combines two or more raw images into a single raw with an extended dynamic range.
Film Emulator A Javascript implementation of mapping film emulation color presets to an image.
Forensically Photo forensics in a browser including Error Level Analysis and Detection of Copy-Move Forgery in Digital Images.
Siril Siril is an astronomical image processing tool, able to convert, pre-process images, help aligning them automatically or manually, stack them and enhance final images.
Enblend/Enfuse Seamless image and exposure blending.
MacroFusion A GUI interface for using Enfuse to blend images.
VIPS A fully demand-driven, threaded image processing library with no image size limits and good support for color.
GraphicsMagickGraphicsMagick is a collection of tools and libraries which support reading, writing, and manipulating an image in over 88 major formats.
Fotoxx Fotoxx is a program for image editing and collection management.
PhotoFlare This is an effort to bring quick, simple but powerful image editing to the masses. PhotoFlare is inspired by the image editor currently only available on Microsoft Windows – PhotoFiltre.
View, Sort, and Manage
Digikam Advanced digital photo management application for importing and organizing photos.
gThumb gThumb is an image viewer and browser. It also includes an importer tool for transferring photos from cameras.
Shotwell Shotwell is a photo manager for GNOME 3.
nomacs nomacs is a free, open source image viewer, which supports multiple platforms. You can use it for viewing all common image formats including raw and psd images.
Geeqie Geeqie is a lightweight image viewer for Linux, BSDs, and compatibles.
A Photo Manager Manage big local photo collections on Android phones and tablets: gallery, geotag with photomap, tags, find, sort, view, copy, delete, send, …
KPhotoAlbum KPhotoAlbum is a tool which you can use to easily sort your images.
Pix Pix is part of the X-Apps project, which aims at producing cross-distribution and cross-desktop software.
Camera Utilities
Open Camera Open Camera is an open source camera app for Android phones and tablets with advanced features.
Airnef Utility for downloading image and movies from WiFi-equipped Nikon cameras.
Entangle Graphical interface for tethered shooting.
digiCamControl An innovative and easy to use solution for complex camera control!
Color and Profiling
DisplayCAL Open Source Display Calibration and Characterization powered by Argyll CMS.
Argyll CMS An ICC compatible color management system.
DCamProf A command line tool for generating camera profiles and to perform tasks related to camera profiling.
Other
Magic Lantern Software add-on that runs from an SD/CF card and adds a host of new features to Canon EOS cameras that weren’t included from the factory.
CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit) Software add-on that runs on point-and-shoot Canon cameras, giving them more features.
Blender 3D creation suite supporting the entire 3D pipeline: modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and more.
Rapid Photo Downloader Rapid Photo Downloader aims to get photos off your camera storage as fast as possible.
Phatch Phatch is an user friendly, cross-platform Photo Batch Processor and Exif Renamer with a nice graphical user interface.
Exiv2 Exiv2 is a C++ library and a command line utility to manage image metadata. It provides fast and easy read and write access to the Exif, IPTC and XMP metadata of digital images in various formats.
exiftool ExifTool is a platform-independent, command-line application for reading, writing, and editing metadata.
gPhoto gphoto2 is the command line (CLI) interface to libgphoto2.
OpenDroneMap OpenDroneMap is an open source toolkit for processing aerial drone imagery.
JPEG Club JPEGclub.org develops new JPEG features and maintains the Independent JPEG Group’s (IJG) software.
Lepton Lepton is a tool and file format for losslessly compressing JPEGs by an average of 22%.
Free/Open Source Photography
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