Over the years that I've been using a Linux desktop I have gone through nearly all the photograph/image management applications there are available. And, curiously enough I haven't seen an application that seems to get all the features together in a simple easy to use package. While others would and do have different workflows, being a hobbyist allows me some freedom in talking about features that I'd like to see. Some of these features would be easily recognizable - I/we seem them on flickr or, any other web-based gallery service that is popular. The photograph/image management features do not include any photograph/image editing features. More on that later. Here's a laundry list of things I'd like to see:

• Ability to handle external/removable media in a graceful manner : I store my photographs on an external drive. I'd like to see the application being able to recognize my image store once it is plugged in without having to go through the click-through process of letting the application figure out
• Ability to tag/group/categorize and create collections : In real life we are more attuned to flip through photographs which are 'in albums' that are thematically linked. An application that allows all of that to happen while not mucking around with the EXIF and other meta data of the image is a nice one to have
• Ability to create an album on a removable media : If the application allows the creation of an album on a removable media (viz. think 'photographs from recent trip made into a DVD') that is a nice thing to have
• Ability to handle RAW images : I don't do much of RAW but the couple of times I did shoot it was painful enough to have jump through multiple applications and do basic processing
• Ability to browse through photographs based on EXIF data : An image contains lots of meta data points to allow various kinds of slicing and dicing. Enabling that does help in checking for basic flaws or even checking trends, spotting most used parameters
• Ability to suggest rotation : Flickr does this reasonably well. And, a local application should be able to that too
• Ability to resize using percentage/ratio : This would be nice to have rather than what is available now
• Ability to export tags while publishing : Comes in real handy when publishing to Flickr

Shotwell, which I currently use, does a couple of the above very nicely. However, the desire is to see an application that is feature-packaged a bit better than what is currently available.