Fotoxx Review - A Powerful Photo Editor

very good
key review info
application features
  • Easy to use
  • (3 more, see all...)

The Fotoxx application is a free image-editing application that comes with a ton of features, including management of RAW files. It's not difficult to find this kind of applications on the Linux platform, but not all of them are good. Fortunately, Fotoxx is a more than adequate solution.

Image editing applications on the Linux platform are a dime a dozen and some of them are extremely advanced. In fact, they could probably compete with commercial applications that are available on the Windows and Mac OS X platforms. The problem is that with great power comes great complexity, and most of the users don't really want two million features when they probably just want something good and simple.

Fotoxx is situated somewhere in the middle, and it offers users a clean and simple interface. If you only want to sort some of the pictures that you just took and eventually transform them into another format, without too much hassle, then Fotoxx is just what you wanted. On the other hand, the application is perfectly capable of offering some more advanced features, but they do require some prior experience from the user.

Installation

It's quite possible to find Fotoxx in your repository, but if you're using Ubuntu, you might want to download the latest version from the official website. It's a DEB file, and it's pretty easy to install. All you need to do is enter these commands in a terminal (you will have to be root to make this work):

code
sudo dpkg -i fotoxx-15.09.2-x86_64.deb
sudo apt-get install -f
The interesting part is that the developers are also providing a separate Maps package that helps with the images that have been geo-tagged. Some of you might not know this, but if you take a picture with your phone and the GPS is active, the information about the location will also be stored. In this case, it's useful to have a map so you can pinpoint where a picture was taken. To install the Maps package, just enter this command:
code
sudo dpkg -i fotoxx-maps-1.1-all.deb

Usage

As I was saying earlier, the application is built in such a way that some of the more obvious and used features are placed at the top, improving the usability for simple tasks. That is why stuff like Gallery, File, Save and Metadata are the first in the left-side menu. Clicking on these options will open a secondary menu, with all kinds of functions, most of which are available in other apps as well.

When we go down to the second half of the menu, we'll see that things start to get a little bit more complicated. Users can select just areas of the image, and apply all kind of filters, starting from simple stuff like Red Eye remover to vignetting, mosaic, and a ton of other stuff. There are dozens of functions, and it will take a long time to learn them all.

Among the functions you will find there are posterize, convert to drawing or painting, emboss, tiles, dots, cartoon, sharpen, clean noise, fix red eyes, adjust color, paint, HDR, HDF, panorama, mashup, and much more.


The Good

Fotoxx is a lot more complex than it might seem at a first glance. The fact that it's not intimidating to new users is actually a feature, and the fact that people who want more from the app will definitely find it is a bonus.

The Bad

The only problem I had with the application is that it handles RAW images pretty slowly. I'm not expecting to see Fotoxx move flawlessly from one RAW file to another, but it seems to be sluggish. Also, activating some menus can take a little too much time for my taste, but it might also be a RAW-related problem.

Conclusion

Fotoxx is the kind of application that doesn't have a great story, and it's not all that attractive, but once you start using it, you don't really want to go back to other applications. It has a steep learning curve and users will need to learn a new way of doing things, but it will be worth it. Coupled with the fact that Fotoxx is also updated often, it makes this a great solution for the user's day to day photo needs.

user interface 4
features 4
ease of use 3
pricing / value 5


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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Photo Gallery (9 Images)

Fotoxx in action
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