It’s not particularly difficult to find alternative photo viewers or photo gallery apps if those that come shipped with your computer’s Linux distro aren’t to your fancy.
However, there aren’t that many that can play iOS Live Photos. For this particular reason, Fotema is quite interesting.
Fotema is a free and open-source Linux photo gallery application built primarily for GNOME desktop environments. Its main appeal (as mentioned before) is the fact that it can play iOS Live Photos.
Another fairly interesting aspect of the app is that its GUI is designed to resemble a mobile GUI. That’s not all that bad, and even though it doesn’t feature the design language of iOS or Android for that matter.
The app is capable of displaying pictures and photos, as well as playing videos or iOS Live Photos seamlessly. The photos are automatically organized by the app in a couple of sections (Folder, All, Month, and Year).
As far as supported formats go, Fotema is up to standards, so to speak. In short, it supports pretty much all media formats that Loupe (GNOME’s default image viewer) supports.
Clearly, Fotema is a simple app designed to offer users a sleek user experience while viewing photos with the small quirk of al also being able to preview iOS Live Photos.
This means that its feature set is not something worth writing home about. I think I would have preferred some extra organization/sorting options. At the end of the day, this is not a photo organizer app for huge collections, it’s a simple photo gallery app, hence, I can totally forgive everything it’s lacking.
Considering its somewhat unique status (it offers iOS Live Preview capabilities), Fotema will surely find a home on most Linux users who often download photos from their iPhones and iPads on their computers.
