KDE Image Database 1.0 Released [LWN.net]

Version 1.0 of KimDaBa, the KDE Image Database, was announced this week on KDE.News:

After exactly one year of coding, several months of bothering people with demos, and 2 long holidays (also used for coding), I've finally gotten my act together enough to make a public release of KimDaBa. If you have a large pile of digital images and need a sane solution for managing them, KimDaBa could well be the answer to your prayers.

The design of KimDaBa was aimed at achieving these goals:

Images should be easily described, individually, and as part of a group.
The system should be able to search for images, based on their metadata properties.
Browsing through large numbers of images should be easy and fast.

Typical image viewing operations such as Zoom, rotate, and full screen display are included in the application. KimDaBa also includes a built-in slide show mode for manual and automatic cycling through images. Image metadata may be displayed with the image. One interesting feature is the ability to overlay circles, rectangles, and arrows on the image to highlight certain parts of the image.

KimDaBa differs from simple image display programs in that it maintains a database of image metadata, which can be used to speed up the process of quickly locating and grouping images. The program has been set up so that it is easy to switch from one search thread to another, allowing one to follow a tangential search pattern.

In the examples shown on the KimDaBa home page, image properties include categories for persons, locations, and keywords. High level searching functions allow groups of images to be specified according to search patterns with boolean qualifiers. For example, it is possible to search for all pictures of your brother in Spain.

KimDaBa looks to be a useful addition to the Linux user's digital photography toolkit.