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 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!
Photography workflow application and raw processor.
A powerful cross-platform raw photo processing program.
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 handles your raw files, as well as your bitmap files, in a non-destructive 16 bit processing pipeline.
Streamlined raw management and editing application centered around a film-simulating tone mapping algorithm.
Raw and raster image processor featuring non-destructive adjustment layers and 32-bit floating-point accuracy.
LightZone is raw processing software that lets the user build up a stack of tools which can be rearranged and readjusted.
Lychee is a free photo-management tool, which runs on your server or web-space. Upload, manage and share photos like from a native application. Lychee comes with everything you need and all your photos are stored securely.
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 is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. fgallery shows your photos, and nothing else.
Gallery is a web based software that lets you manage your photos
on your own website.
No longer maintained.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 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 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 is photo gallery software for the web, built by an active community of users and developers.
ResourceSpace open source digital asset management software is the simple, fast, and free way to organise your digital assets
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).
Cross platform pixel-editing software for photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.
Digital painting and illustration application with CMYK support, HDR painting, G’MIC integration and more.
A software suite to create, edit, compose or convert images on the command line.
Full featured framework for image processing with different user interfaces, including a GIMP plugin to convert, manipulate, filter, and visualize image data.
Panorama stitching and blending application.
Application to provide a workflow for HDR imaging, creation, and tone mapping.
HDRMerge combines two or more raw images into a single raw with an extended dynamic range.
A Javascript implementation of mapping film emulation color presets to an image.
Photo forensics in a browser including Error Level Analysis and Detection of Copy-Move Forgery in Digital Images.
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.
Seamless image and exposure blending.
A GUI interface for using Enfuse to blend images.
Image processing in Java.
A fully demand-driven, threaded image processing library with no image size limits and good support for color.
GraphicsMagick is a collection of tools and libraries which support reading, writing, and manipulating an image in over 88 major formats.
Fotoxx is a program for image editing and collection management.
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.
Advanced digital photo management application for importing and organizing photos.
gThumb is an image viewer and browser. It also includes an importer tool for transferring photos from cameras.
Shotwell is a photo manager for GNOME 3.
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 is a lightweight image viewer for Linux, BSDs, and compatibles.
Manage big local photo collections on Android phones and tablets: gallery, geotag with photomap, tags, find, sort, view, copy, delete, send, …
KPhotoAlbum is a tool which you can use to easily sort your images.
Pix is part of the X-Apps project, which aims at producing cross-distribution and cross-desktop software.
Open Camera is an open source camera app for Android phones and tablets with advanced features.
Utility for downloading image and movies from WiFi-equipped Nikon cameras.
Graphical interface for tethered shooting.
An innovative and easy to use solution for complex camera control!
Open Source Display Calibration and Characterization powered by Argyll CMS.
An ICC compatible color management system.
A command line tool for generating camera profiles and to perform tasks related to camera profiling.
Open Source Compositing Software For VFX and Motion Graphics.
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.
What is MLV App? Lightroom, but for Magic Lantern MLV Video (and open source and cross platform).
Software add-on that runs on point-and-shoot Canon cameras, giving them more features.
3D creation suite supporting the entire 3D pipeline: modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and more.
Rapid Photo Downloader aims to get photos off your camera storage as fast as possible.
Phatch is an user friendly, cross-platform Photo Batch Processor and Exif Renamer with a nice graphical user interface.
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 is a platform-independent, command-line application for reading, writing, and editing metadata.
jhead reads and manipulates jpeg metadata.
gphoto2 is the command line (CLI) interface to libgphoto2.
OpenDroneMap is an open source toolkit for processing aerial drone imagery.
JPEGclub.org develops new JPEG features and maintains the Independent JPEG Group’s (IJG) software.
Lepton is a tool and file format for losslessly compressing JPEGs by an average of 22%.
slowmoVideo is an OpenSource program that creates slow-motion videos from your footage.
QWinFF is a GUI for FFmpeg, a powerful command-line media converter.
Free/Open Source Photography
Unless otherwise noted content on this site, PIXLS.US by Pat David, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.