Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Beef Shawarma and Charleston friets (pepper gravy and cheese sauce)
Digikam is a KDE based photo manager. It’s a little more complicated than Shotwell, but can do quite a bit more with your indexed images. Just browsing through the menus it’s easy to see that Digikam has far more features and ways to view your photo collection than Shotwell.
Like Shotwell, Digikam uses a database to store metadata for each photo. Digikam can be configured to use SQLite (the default) or MySQL so I spent some time exploring both. MySQL 5.5+ defaults to using InnoDB tables, and scanning my photo directory (41k+ images) ended up taking several hours to finish and had the hard drive churning away the entire time. Switching to MyISAM tables makes the process much faster (a little over an hour) and was a lot quieter. The SQLite option is decidedly quicker, finishing the scan in just under an hour. In either case, the database can get pretty large if you have a big image collection.
Digikam lets you create a hierarchy of tags that you can apply to your images (didn’t notice if Shotwell lets you do thatShotwell 0.11 has this feature). One thing to note when applying tags is that the parent tag is automatically selected when a child tag is applied to an image. Selecting a parent tag automatically selects all the child tags under the parent. Not sure I like that behaviour so it’s something to think about when creating your tags.
Digikam synchronizes with nepomuk (KDE’s desktop indexer) so things like ratings and comments can go back and forth.
Despite the abundance of features like face and geotagging (haven’t tried those out yet) and more image editing options, Digikam isn’t difficult to learn. You’ll spend a little more time poking around checking out different things but if you’re looking for a little more out of your photo management software, Digikam would be worth a look.
The version of Shotwell in the Fedora 16 repo (Shotwell 0.10.1) is a little bit behind the current release (0.11.6) so some of my comments might have been taken care of already. If the new version doesn’t make it into the F16 repo as an update, I might try to install the new version and run it in parallel.
The first thing I like about Shotwell is the timeline or “Event” view of all your photos. You get to see all your photos in chronological order.
Categorizing photos by adding tags is pretty easy. Adding tags to a batch of photos is easy. Batch modifying tags isn’t quite so easy and is a little cumbersome. It would be nice if it worked the same way as adding tags.
There are basic image editing functions available: crop, red-eye reduction, auto image enhance. For more sophisticated image editing, you can right click and open the image in an external editor that you can specify (such as GIMP).
Built-in plugins let you upload photos to places like Picasa, Facebook, Flicker, etc.
Shotwell lets you remove items from the library or delete them by moving them into the trash. The first is useful if Shotwell has imported images that you don’t want it to manage, but if there are lots of them, it can be a bit of a cumbersome process.
The interface is simple and easy to figure out and the learning curve isn’t very steep. A decent little program for managing your photos regardless of how many photos you have.
Nala turns 7 years old today! Happy birthday to my girl!
She’s getting a little grayer around the muzzle these days, but still acts like a puppy sometimes. Most times she’s pretty content to find a nice soft pillow to nap on although she’s more than happy to go exploring the world with her nose when we go out on walks.
With over 100GB (43k+) of photos and images on my computer, I decided I needed a good way to manage and view all those pictures, rather than my usual navigating through the directory structure.
Shotwell and Digikam are both in the Fedora repositories, so they were obvious candidates to start with. I used f-spot briefly a while ago, and although the last release was over a year ago, I’ll give it a whirl too.
I’ll be spending a few blog posts exploring the three packages.