blueMarine updated

Wed, 01/02/2008 - 16:59 — Alan

It's been a while since I checked up on how blueMarine was doing. I liked what it was intending to do, but I had the feeling that it wasn't aiming in the direction that I was looking for. Looking at it now, it seems like it will be a good open-source replacement for the standard photo management part of iPhoto.

It won't replace iPhoto completely since that has a lot of iLife integration. However, I've never had cause to use any of that integration. I don't have a .mac account, it's just never appealed to me, seeming too restrictive for what I want. I much prefer taking best-of-breed components and integrating them. The benefits of each component's power usually outweighs the bundled, but limited approach.

blueMarine appears to be taking a route to start in the Digital Asset Management domain and add extra functionality by way of plug-ins. The last time I'd tried it, it wouldn't do anything for me that iPhoto didn't do. Anyway, I purchased Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom so I could finish my images as I wanted to see them. I'm now seriously toying with the idea of playing around with blueMarine a bit more even if only to submit a few errors (assuming I find any). From what I cn see, it's been a slow development, but I can't blame anyone since I didn't get involved. As with any open-source application, it'll only get somewhere if people want it to and if they (i.e. we) put effort into it. I'm also considering using a spare, but old desktop as the front-end for simple video editing. That would probably be on Ubuntu (maybe Ubuntu Studio, but not necessarily). blueMarine could be useful for that installation.

From blueMarine's site
blueMarine foundation is very similar to existing applications such as Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture: a photo browser, which can be explored in different ways (by folder, by calendar, by tags, by galleries). This is just a core upon which different modules can be plugged in. The aim of blueMarine is to fully support the photographic workflow, even before the photo shoot (for instance, trip planning supported by maps) and beyond print or archival. For instance, an ornithologist usually manages field notes about the bird observed and photographed: directly binding them to photos and maybe GPS positioning data is much better than keeping a separate Excel sheet

There's a good page on how to get involved.

And a good set of instructions for getting started