digiKam is the only usable photoorganizer in Linux [LWN.net]

digiKam is the only usable photoorganizer in Linux

Posted Dec 2, 2009 21:43 UTC (Wed) by Velmont (guest, #46433)
Parent article: digiKam approaches 1.0

For me, that it. I've tested all of the ones I've found, I had these criteria:

* FAST (almost every photo organizer fell through here)
* Handle thousands of pictures
* DON'T mess with my folders (or «import» pictures to some stupid location)
* Tags are saved INSIDE the files (so that I can delete the database, or move the files to web storage)

digiKam does all of this. I was a bit reluctant to install it to grab the whole KDE (including Dolphin and KMail, WTF Ubuntu!?) as well. But as I said, this program is the only one that's actually usable with a huge amount of picture files. I don't know what all the GTK-guys are doing wrong - but F-spot will never be cater to the pros.

digiKam could have a better interface for tagging hundreds of pictures, I can't find a totally keyboarddriven way to tag pictures. But still, I'm extremely happy I tried it out although it doesn't fit in on my desktop looking all strange and QT-ish. ;-)

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digiKam is the only usable photoorganizer in Linux

Posted Dec 2, 2009 21:46 UTC (Wed) by Velmont (guest, #46433) [Link]

Wow, that was badly written.

I meant that almost no picture organizer in linux is fast. Not even *picture showing* programs. digiKam can flash through my big pictures with me looking 0.5 sec on each before going to the next. I haven't found any GTK/Gnome image viewer that is so quick.

Not even feh, qiv et.al. can beat digiKam's speed. I love it. I don't want to wait for the program when looking through pictures.

digiKam is the only usable photoorganizer in Linux

Posted Dec 3, 2009 0:42 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I don't know about Dolphin, but KMail probably comes in because Digikam lets you send pictures off to other people by mail. This is an extremely handy feature because Digikam will scale the pictures down for you first so you don't clog up the recipients' inboxes.

Digikam lets you control how the e-mail is actually being sent so the dependency on KMail ought to be a »Recommends«. If it isn't, that's probably a packaging bug.