Today I am full of Mad Love for DigiKam, the photo manager distributed with KDE. I’ve been using it off and on for a few years, and for one reason or another, I would stray away and use manual file copies for a while.
As of about a year ago though, I’ve moved to using it full time for managing the (sometimes hundreds) of pictures I take in a given session. There’s a whole slew of wonderful functions in it, but the ones that made me finally stick with it can be summed up as follows:
- Automatic directory creation and sorting when importing from the camera. Directories can be created according to the date the picture was taken (importing 250 pictures from my camera may make 4 directories, if I was shooting over several days)
- Direct support for my Canon 400D. When I plug in the USB, KDE prompts me to start Digikam, and everything is imported.
- Full support for Exif data, including image orientaton, etc. Exif data is never removed or ‘flushed’ from the images.
- Excellent export functionality to either Flickr or to a series of HTML files and thumbnails.
- Very good gallery organization, sorting, and previewing. I can work with thousands of images and sort them into appropriate directories.
- Tagging allows sorting and categorizing of images without reordering the directories. Searching for tags, dates, or other data generates a new view based on the tag criteria.
- Easy calling of external programs such as The Gimp for post-processing.
All of this, combined with, well, it LOOKS great, make Digikam one of my favorite KDE apps.
