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Top Linux photo managers side-by-side (Linux.com)

Linux.com compares the DigiKam, F-Spot, GQview, imgSeek and Picasa photo management applications. "While a full-fledged image editor may be the best way to repair digital photos, most of the time users need only to make minor touch-ups; it is organizing, sorting, and finding a specific photo that eat up all the time. For that task, as is often the case with Linux, you have several options to choose from. Let's take a look at the major photo management applications, and compare them side by side."
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Note to the editor

Posted Dec 14, 2006 17:28 UTC (Thu) by jpetso (subscriber, #36230) [Link]

You forgot mention DigiKam next to the four other apps, which is actually
the first one in the article's review list.

Article ignores web-based organizers too

Posted Dec 14, 2006 17:56 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

I suppose they're not strictly "Linux-based" per se, but as the article seems to harp the most on "organization", they really shouldn't exclude these alternatives:

* Gallery
* Coppermine
* Photo Organizer (which I maintain)
* LinPHA
* (probably a bazillion others..)

Going to something (web-)server-based removes you from the limitations of being chained to a single PC to manage everything, and also gives you considerably better multi-user support and automagic web publishing. The downfall is that highly interactive things like photo retouching isn't generally available or particularly robust.

Article ignores web-based organizers too

Posted Dec 14, 2006 18:26 UTC (Thu) by superstoned (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

another nice photo organizer is kphotobook. tough it also lacks editing of
pictures...

http://kphotobook.berlios.de/

Gthumb good

Posted Dec 14, 2006 20:03 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

I'm fond of gThumb, myself. It's completely Free, doesn't depend on flaky interpreters, is fast, doesn't crash, and doesn't force a directory organization on you. Despite the author's snarky remark in the comment section, it does support common editing tasks like rotation, scaling, cropping, and contrast enhancement; it's not just a "viewer".

The author seems to have written the review mainly to say how much better he likes Picasa than the Free alternatives. A good Free alternative would have interfered with his theme.

gThumb might be more popular if one of the checkboxes in the UI defaulted a different way. For optimal use on a big screen, look under the View menu, on the "Show/Hide" submenu: "Image preview" should be on.

Gthumb does crash

Posted Dec 14, 2006 22:40 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

Try running gthumb on a directory that is changing. I made the mistake of running it on a directory where I was copying a bunch of pictures into; trying to create thumbnails on files that were being written to blew its cookies. I did more experiments, and the crash is fairly repeatable. You also wind up with defective thumbnails (part of the image on top of a band of solid grey).

This is for whatever version of gthumb is on FC5, I haven't checked to see if the bug has been fixed.

Top Linux photo managers side-by-side (Linux.com)

Posted Dec 14, 2006 20:45 UTC (Thu) by yokem_55 (guest, #10498) [Link]

I wouldn't be surprised if this guy's exif libs under Digikam were messed up for some reason, as I've nevery had any trouble with Digikam properly reading the exif data on any of my files. Also, he didn't even mention the simply awesome capabilities of the Digikam Photo editor (16-bit/channel color support for all plugins!).

Top Linux photo managers side-by-side (Linux.com)

Posted Dec 15, 2006 9:20 UTC (Fri) by riteshsarraf (subscriber, #11138) [Link]

Forgetting to include KDE's KPhotoAlbum shows that the author might have
not done his homework.

Top Linux photo managers side-by-side (Linux.com)

Posted Dec 19, 2006 11:13 UTC (Tue) by pointwood (subscriber, #2814) [Link]

I've never had a problem with Digikam's exif reading capabilities either.

Also worthy of a note is that Digikam 0.9 has just been released. It contains many new features and improvements.

Top Linux photo managers side-by-side (Linux.com)

Posted Dec 22, 2006 0:59 UTC (Fri) by superstoned (subscriber, #33164) [Link]

indeed, i just checked it out. nice improvements, tough the interface imho
still needs some work. maybe they should just make a choice between a tag
view, date view or album view (i'd go with date, btw). or do something
like amarok, which can choose several levels of organization. let's hope
they can get a usability review before their KDE4 version comes out... cuz
they surely have the most potent image management app out there.

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