At GUADEC 5 I gave a talk about Digital Photography in GNOME.
Abstract
Digital Photography in the last years has been the most dynamic market for photography products. Ever since the first consumer products that appeared in the mid 90s, UN*X users have been attempting to use them with their favourite environment. A few open source projects have given photographers ways to access their photos off either digital cameras or scanners from UN*X. I'll try to explain the different means of accessing these, depending of the media, and I'll try to cover tools and API available for GNOME users and developers.
SANE is the ultimate scanner driver for Linux. It provides drivers for more that 48 scanners families (each containing up to a few dozens of models) and more importantly a software architecture to use these drivers from various applications, including the GTK+ enabled frontend XSane.
libgphoto2 is a library that allow you to access more than 400 different cameras over USB or serial port, in addition to the already supported cameras that use the USB Mass Storage protocol. Gtkam, its GTK+ frontend has been around for a while giving GUI access to the libgphoto2 features.
Around these two components, there are a other tools to manage and edit the pictures. The master piece is the well known Gimp, but we'll see that there are a few plugins that may be of good use, like Pandora or dustremove ; as well as browsers like gqview or Nautilus.
Basic building pieces for digital photography in GNOME are here, but there are still areas were improvements can be made.