Digital Photo Management In Linux

Macs include the excellent iPhoto for no extra cost, and if you want to spend money the Aperture photo-management application is first-rate.They are strictly for managing and editing digital photos; they're not full-blown desktop publishing suites. So what does Linux offer for the ace digital photographer who doesn't want to splurge on a Mac? How about a few goodies like:

• Multiple filetype support, including RAW, TIFF, and JPG, as well as host of others
• Support for audio and movie files
• Download and photo archive management
• Light table for side-by-side image comparisons
• Camera profile support
• Batch processing
• Image editing, including color, hue, red-eye correction, gamma, contrast, and white balance adjustments
• Resizing, cropping, and changing aspect ratios
• Read/write EXIF data and comments

You'll find these, and a lot more, in Digikam. Digikam is a sleek, fully-featured digital photo management application for KDE. What about non-KDE users? It runs fine in any Linux window manager or desktop environment, as long as you install the necessary KDE libraries.


From the Beginning

Starting out organized is the key to managing large photo archives sanely. Snapping your pics is just the first step. Then the real fun begins: downloading them to your PC, organizing, editing, printing, or making online photo galleries. Digikam has some nice tools for managing your photo collections, so today we'll learn how to do that.

While most digital cameras can be connected directly to a PC to download photos, I think it's better to use a USB card reader. They're inexpensive, around $20 or less, and usually a lot faster.

Digikam first creates thumbnails from your camera card. Then you select which images to download. Ctrl+left-click selects one at a time, Shift+left-click selects batches at a time. Images -> Select New Items is a quick way to find only new images that have not been downloaded already. Or just select "Download all." Then you get a nice dialog that lets you download your photos into an existing directory, or create a new one.

Once that is finished, close the download window and remove your camera card to prevent accidents. Open the directory containing your new pics, and Digikam again flings up a page of thumbnails. You can easily change the size of the thumbnails with the View menu. Click once on a thumbnail to open or close the image. You may also open an image, then navigate through your images with the little arrows on the bottom right.



Tagging and Albums

That's all the basic, easy stuff. Now it gets interesting, because as anyone with giant photo archives knows, cataloguing and finding the darn things is the hard part. Digikam has two good tools for managing your photos: tags and albums.

Albums are the individual directories that you create for your photos. Each album, like any directory, can have sub-directories. You can organize albums together with the Collection tag; right-click on any album and select "Edit Album Properties". Then find all the albums in a Collection with "Tools -> Advanced Search".

A fun and useful feature is you can right-click on the thumbnail of any photo in an album, and select "Set as Album Thumbnail." This replaces the boring blue folder icon.

Tagging is the power tool for picking out specific photos from your vast collection. Right-click any thumbnail or image and select "Assign Tag." You can assign multiple tags to a single photo, which is handy when your photos fit in multiple categories. For example, a beautiful mountain landscape could be tagged as "mountain, sky, forest". Then use "Tools -> Advanced Search" to find photos by their tags. After you create a new tag, Digikam automatically puts it into a drop-down list.

Shortcut Tabs

Notice the left-hand tabs: Albums, Dates, Tags, and Searches. Click the Dates tab to see all of your images automatically arranged by date, and a calendar at the bottom with the dates highlighted. The Tags tab is a great shortcut for Tag searches. On the right-hand set of tabs, the Commentary/Tags tab lets you add or remove tags quickly with checkboxes.

Tags can also be given custom icons. By default KDE will find the installed system and application icons. You can make your own custom icons with kiconedit or babygimp, which is more fun than recycling the stock icons.