LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications"

Digikam

kayosiii — Wed, 25 May 2005 11:52:42 +0000

Assigning "Tags" -- You can also assign tags by selecting a group of
images and dragging them onto a Tag. You can do a large number of images
more easily using this method.

Rotation of images is best done outside of the image editor (this way it
is non lossy)... Select the group of images you want to rotate. Right
Click -> Rotate -> select rotation.

Printing: Album -> export -> print Wizard...

There are two sets of Plugins for Digikam - Kipi and Digikam plugins...
Much of the functionality that Grumpy editor was looking for is included
in these. Installing them was dead easy on my Mepis Box

AlbumShaper

wstokes — Tue, 10 May 2005 16:31:09 +0000

It's nice to see AS getting some attention. ;-) In case you're reading this discussion, can you let me know why you prefer using gthumb to rotate/rename your images? These are things Album Shaper tries to do as best as it possibly can. You do know AS supports batch rotation and keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+R/L).
-Will Stokes, Album Shaper developer

Common irritations

wstokes — Tue, 10 May 2005 16:28:42 +0000

You might enjoy using Album Shaper.
-Select one or more photos and click the rotate buttons at the bottom of the screen to batch rotate one ormore.
-Be a power user. Use the arrow keys to navigate and Ctrl+R/L to rotate the selected photo semi-instantly using fast lossless transformations that work.
-Album Shaper provides an intelligent red-eye removal tool. In many cases you can select the entire image and the program finds the eyes and changes just them. Other red objects (like red lips) are almost always ignored.

I don't support EXIF data and tagging withing Album Shaper *yet*. It's being developed right now.

-Will

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

lbt — Sun, 01 May 2005 11:34:07 +0000

Can I suggest looking at mapivi : http://mapivi.sourceforge.net/mapivi.shtml

It's an _excellent_ tool for managing large collections of images and to be honest it's functionality will best be appreciated by those who've been taking digital photos for a while!
It's very fully featured but does have some minor ui fragility issues.

It handles exif very well indeed, has mass processing (eg select 20 photos, type 'a' and enter a comment common to all: eg Holiday June 2004) or select those that need rotating 90deg right and do a lossless jpeg rotate.

It allows good image searches via any exif information - eg enter 'Holiday 2004' and you'll get all your snaps from any 2004 holidays.
Much better than trying to use folders to arrange them.

I also add a rating to good photos so I can search for all my 'best' photos

It's written in perl (for those who care) and allows powerful extensions/plugins.

Drawbacks:
* some ui bugs - eg changing directory whilst it's still scanning the 1st
* slow image preview

Just a happy user.

The "UNIX" way

guest01 — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:56:41 +0000

Remember way back when, when you first started using Linux/BSD/UNIX, and your Windows friends would laugh at you because emacs/vi didn't have a built-in spell-checker? And then you'd say: "but I've got 'ispell', it works with all my files, why would I want a spell checker integrated into each and every one of the tools I use when I could have one really good independent tool that I can use for all my files?"

But they just laughed anyway. And you'd try, valiantly, to explain the "many small programs with pipes" idea and show them the power of a good "grep | cut | tr | sort" command-line but they'd just look at you like you were nuts.

Remember that time? So why is everyone rushing to these all-in-one solve-all-your-problems-in-one-application utilities? Thank goodness for the "old-timers" like ImageMagik which are command-line driven. Anything I can do on a command-line can be placed in a script and performed on hundreds of files while I sleep.

From the moment I started taking digital pictures I've used nothing more than a set of about a dozen or so bash and python scripts to manage my pictures and generate thumbs, reduced images, and create web-pages ready for my server.

No wonder "linux on the desktop" is becoming an embarrassing, bloated eye-sore!

exif

guest01 — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 16:39:07 +0000

Regarding f-spot:
The sorting of images depends on the date stored in each image's EXIF data; if that data does not exist, the images are given the current date. There appears to be no way to fix an image with a missing date, so it will be forever displayed in the wrong place.

There's a program called exif which is a command-line tool that will allow you to modify exif tags; you could use that tool to set the date in the exif information. The scripts I use to process my images use this command-line tool to set the author/copyright information in all my images.

gqview

yem — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:19:18 +0000

I love the speed of gqview.

One thing I wish it had was support for loading raw digital camera files via dcraw. If that were possible, it would enable users to select a set of files, and send them off to, say, ufraw for colour processing and conversion to jpeg. UFRaw is great, but it's missing a nice interface for selecting images and initiating the batch processing.

Is anyone seriously working on dcraw support for either gqview or gdk-pixbuf?

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

evgeny — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 21:00:51 +0000

> Thumbnails are presented in a long, horizontally scrolling window at the bottom; they show up in the order in which they were imported.

Well, that's a reasonable default ;-). Then, just drag the thumbnails as you like.

> There is no way to rotate multiple images at once.

Select multiple thumbnails (mouse click with Ctrl pressed) and then go to Selected Images->Transform selected->... Shortcuts for the operations are defined, too.

> There is a "properties" window which shows basic EXIF information and allows the entry of comments; those comments are not used for anything, however.

They're used for the web album export and slide shows.

Showimg

mdhirsch — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 17:57:42 +0000

I use showimg, a KDE app that can use digikam plugins. It would have been
nice to see it in the review. I find it quite handy and featureful.

Yes, Image Management apps.

pizza — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 13:54:35 +0000

>Yep. I use exifiron for lossless cropping, rotation, or both.
>I've fiddled with jpegtran as well, and can't remember what
>I've ended up using for what. :-)

jpegtran has issues with every digicam I've owned.. it always left a strip on the side of the image unless I used the --trim option. So I ended up getting a lossy rotation. I was rather happy to discover exifiron got it right.

Picasa

rjw — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 10:42:17 +0000

I don't really get this. Picasa isn't very different than eg f-spot. What killer features do you think Picasa has? It has some I've never heard of anyone use.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

ekj — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 08:57:05 +0000

Certainly. If there's something in there you find informative or otherwise useful, use it however you like. If you make something about Kimdaba, send me a link or something. I'm curious.

Looking For A Project?

gjmarter — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 03:50:06 +0000

I have a somewhat different form of image management that I would like to see. I have never been able to put any time into developing it though, so I'll post it here in the selfish hope that somebody else wants it too.

Modern digital cameras have the nice feature that you have a fairly accurate date on every photo. I however, have a big pile of old photographs that I am slowly scanning in to my computer. I would like to have a tool that helps me organize these pictures chronologically.

The general idea would be to have an interface that presents me with two photos whose date order is not known, and the user would identify which photo comes first chronologically possibly recording a rationale. Over time, the database of time relationships would grow and a more complete time line would emerge.

Also, it should be possible to add non-photo events to the time line such as "House painted grey", so that I can have an anchor against where I put pictures with the grey house and pictures with the house still white.

Yes, Image Management apps.

allenp — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 02:03:15 +0000

> Have a look at _exifiron_ ...

Yep. I use exifiron for lossless cropping, rotation, or both.
I've fiddled with jpegtran as well, and can't remember what
I've ended up using for what. :-)

>> I've always intended to release my ImageTool at some point if it ever
>> stabilized. With so many strong competitors already out there, I may
>> just keep it to myself. :-)

>Oh, you know it'll never be "stable". :) And you never know who else will >pick up the ball.

When it's stable enough that someone who's unfamiliar with the
code (and may not be a coder) can install it and get it to do
something useful, I'll release it. I get lots of interest
whenever I describe what I'm doing, so I know I'll have no
shortage of beta testers.

Paul Allen

re: Digikam Edit Comments

abredon — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 21:06:05 +0000

>How is this different from how digikam works? This sounds like a perfect description of what you get when you choose "Edit Comments & Tags" from the context menu.

I hadn't seen that dialog, and it is significantly better than what most of the other Free Software programs provide, but it takes 1 second to change from image to image in that dialog. Imatch takes under 1/10 second to change images, and I can select multiple images and skip from image to image out of order if I want. Also, the only thing I can do in the (modal) Edit Comments & Tags dialog is edit comments and tags. In IMatch's (non-modal) Category Assignments window, I can be assigning tags, notice that one image needs rotating, rotate it and continue assigning tags. I can then see that another image is completely ruined, delete it and continue assigning tags, all without losing my chain of thought.

Digikam is much better than the other Free options (and is on a par with many commercial programs - I consider it equivalent to Picasa, for example), but is still nowhere near good enough for what I need - the user interface gets in my way. With IMatch, I can sit down for 15 minutes before going to bed, and quickly categorize 300-400 images. When the Free programs get close to that point (i.e. when I can sit down and classify 50-100 programs without losing my train of thought), I will switch.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

a9db0 — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 16:48:14 +0000

No, I read it, and the content and syntax was fine. I just didn't flip the bit for HTML display. Might have had something to do with the three year old climbing into my lap about then, though.

Picasa

alspnost — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 14:48:47 +0000

So what we really need is for Google to port Picasa (www.picasa.com) to Linux and open source it. Check it out it you haven't seen it, it's very slick. It's a shame that the free software world hasn't produced anything on a par with this yet.

Too slow - are you sure?

wjhenney — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 14:26:06 +0000

The reason I can categorize this fast is that the tag selection is a tree with checkboxes. I select an image or images, then click on the appropriate checkboxes, then press a key to move to the next image.

How is this different from how digikam works? This sounds like a perfect description of what you get when you choose "Edit Comments & Tags" from the context menu. You get a persistent window with a big thumbnail of the current image, a text box to write comments in, and a tree view of all your tags with check boxes. Alt-B and Alt-F move you to previous and next image, respectively. You may be right that kimdaba can't do this (I haven't checked) but I think you should do more research before making sweeping comments like "None of the current Free Software Image Database programs ... meets my needs at the current time". Yeah, I know: there's so many of the damn things and life is short :)

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

nhasan — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 13:34:10 +0000

Ok...all is good now. I was rather shocked to hear "hp" defending a KDE application so ferociously. Sanity is restored.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

gc — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 10:18:30 +0000

or rather, you misunderstand the signification of "preview comment"?

Common irritations

gc — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 10:11:21 +0000

> I find the most irritating thing about all these programs is that they use the native "select and edit" notion built into whatever UI toolkit they were coded under.

I have started a web-album oriented software which takes the same irritation as a starter (among others). As a result, I have come-up with three different easy ways to rotate images: mouse gesture (click, drag a little right or left, release), one-click tools (you select the "rotate clockwise" toggle-button in the toolbar, then one click on each image is just what you need to do the rotation), and right-click popup context menu (this is the most "intuitive" for people not reading the doc and/or not used with the first two ways which are more specific). Of course, I also have keyboard shortcuts to do that.

(shameless self-advert) http://zarb.org/~gc/html/booh.html - not in freshmeat or other places yet because I want to finish all the most interesting features first - which is nearly the case btw.

It's not image-management oriented so doesn't aim at implementing too serious features such as cropping. It's more geared towards people who want to create web-albums _fast_.

About your suggestion or rotation, I think that putting buttons next to thumbnails would take up space better used to display images. Mouse gestures are a more elegant solution IMHO. But that can just be a matter of taste.

Raw support?

ke3z — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 09:47:05 +0000

No mention of support for "raw" formats? Which applications can display images from raw (NEF, CRW, etc) files? Not the cheesy low-res embedded thumbnails, but the high-resolution images themselves.

I shoot NEF files. There's a patch for gqview that lets you view NEF. And Photo Organizer, which is what I currently use for management, can handle them via dcraw. But which other image management programs handle raw? Any that can't would be useless to me.

Another important feature, one that PO provides, is the ability to keep multiple versions of a photo -- different crops, for example.

Maybe at some point it would be good to review what's available for more substantive work. Actually, a review of digital photography workflow options under Linux would be good, albeit perhaps too large in scope for LWN.

Too slow

abredon — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 18:07:34 +0000

>but there's no way you could have annotated 3000 photographs in one afternoon to actually get the benefit of this

That's the problem I personally have with kimdaba - it's too slow at organizing.
With the program I currently use (IMatch - a Windows program), I can sift through and tag over 1,000 images in under 1 hour - this includes putting each image into all applicable subcategories of 5 main categories (location, subject, image quality, process, and things in the picture).
The reason I can categorize this fast is that the tag selection is a tree with checkboxes. I select an image or images, then click on the appropriate checkboxes, then press a key to move to the next image. Each image takes only a few seconds to tag, and there is no wasted time and energy right-clicking to bring up an unnecessary dialog, and navigating down into the hierarchy of tags to find the right tags to assign (by which time I may well have forgotten the context of what I was doing)

None of the current Free Software Image Database programs (that is what I call this type of program) meets my needs at the current time, and most seem to be headed in the wrong direction by adding unneeded features like rotation and editing (that many other programs do well) at the expense of the single most important feature - quick categorization (which no Free Software does well yet).

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

pizza — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 14:25:11 +0000

Even barring keeping additional metadata, there are many, many enhancements that can be done to speed it up. Least of which is "if the jpeg file is older than the XML file, the odds are you don't need to re-parse the EXIF data." This change alone would speed things up considerably. I started to add it in, but as I mentioned before... I think I'd rather give myself a frontal lobotomy with a rusty spoon then wade that deep into the code again.

Yes, Image Management apps.

pizza — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 14:16:49 +0000

> I wonder how many hackers got cameras a few years ago and started work
> immediately on a tool to sort the images?

Looking at Freshmeat, I'd wager quite a few. :)

>I'd like to thank the grumpy editor for a great conversation-starter. The
>two features I see here that I haven't thought to implement are batch
>rotation and searching by EXIF date.

Have a look at _exifiron_, part of the _photomolo_ suite. Its purpose is to, well, iron out the images, performing (completely lossless) rotation including updating the EXIF data to reflect the new orientation, strips out EXIF thumbnails, and adjusts the file timestamps to reflect the EXIF timestamp. Oh, and losslessly recompresses the images to use less space -- On average, it's shaved about 10% of the file off. When you're talking about 10K images or so, that space savings really adds up (two gigs in my case!).

> I've always intended to release my ImageTool at some point if it ever
> stabilized. With so many strong competitors already out there, I may
> just keep it to myself. :-)

Oh, you know it'll never be "stable". :) And you never know who else will pick up the ball.

Privacy

cloose — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 12:13:03 +0000

When you use KDE:

Alt+F2
kcmshell privacy
clear all cached thumbnails

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

kleptog — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 03:22:08 +0000

I must agree BINS doesn't scale brilliantly, I only have a bit over 1000 images in it and it does take a little while to regenerate the images. Fortunatly it doesn't rescale/reorientate the images more than once so if you run it often enough it's not too bad.

I do think it could be made smarter, like skipping whole directories if they havn't changed but as it is it doesn't maintain enough metadata. I might patch it if it gets on my nerves... If I'm moving directories around I tend to move them in the output directory too to avoid the rescaling.

Yes, Image Management apps.

allenp — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 02:19:20 +0000

I wonder how many hackers got cameras a few years ago and started work
immediately on a tool to sort the images?

I've got about 13,000 images and about 3000 lines of perl/Tk to manage
them. The image database is an XML file that's now up to about 1.5M.
My ImageTool script takes about a second to start, and most of that
is spent creating the GUI. A query that will return the entire database
has the thumbnail view filled in less than five seconds. Smaller queries
are much faster because they only hit the disk for thumbnail display.

The big problem is to keep up with the tagging. I've had some sort of
tagging capability for about two years, but I've still got piles of
images that have yet to be tagged.

I'd like to thank the grumpy editor for a great conversation-starter. The
two features I see here that I haven't thought to implement are batch
rotation and searching by EXIF date. Another feature I've got on my list
is the ability to email reduced versions of a selection of images to
friends. The free Google tool does that, I think.

I've always intended to release my ImageTool at some point if it ever
stabilized. With so many strong competitors already out there, I may
just keep it to myself. :-)

Paul Allen

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

berntsen — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 19:55:58 +0000

Hm. can't resist making a reference to hp's blog which contains a reference to the "problem" http://log.ometer.com/2005-04.html#9 (not direct link, but search for havoc below).

Just happened to have gotten that link from a friend the other day (and I read on to see the havoc problem), thought it was funny to stumble over this confusion thingy afterwards. They world is "small", probably comes from results of random graph theory (7, I think to recall, handshakes on average between any two people on the earth).

Well, its probably just me being weird and shying away from work at this late hour.

Cheers,
/\/ (formerly (un)known as nike, berntsen, knb, nberntsen, ...)

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

havoc — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 17:52:43 +0000

"Oh, great! Now I have guilt!"

digikam's printing is better than that

vmole — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:12:15 +0000

...and click on Album->Export->Print Wizard...what a shame that you never found them.

What a shame that the digikam developers chose to ignore two decades of normal practice and bury the printing function anywhere except File->Print. Yes, I understand that printing is implemented as just another export plugin. But guess what? Your users don't care how it's implemented. Something as basic as printing shouldn't be something that the user has to hunt for.

For the record, I use digikam. But it's got some real usability issues.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

a9db0 — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:50:08 +0000

Sorry. Blasted "Plain Text or HTML" button got me.

pity

halla — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:46:54 +0000

Isn't the duplicate images thing a kipi plugin? I used it from Digikam to weed out the duplicates
of my images. Is it really only three years ago we got that digital camera? Seven or eight
thousand pictures later...

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

coolian — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:29:19 +0000

And you are creating "havoc" in hp's world.

gqview

coolian — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:27:26 +0000

I couldn't have said it better. gqview is a program that got it right,
exactly like early 2.xx versions of ACDSee on Windows. Blazingly-fast,
simple UI and Blazingly-fast. It was also pretty speedy.

Easy to use over slower ssh links too.

Yes, Image Management apps.

pizza — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:26:58 +0000

I've been trading e-mails with Balint, and I am looking forward to the bulk update interface. I ended up coding up a few hack-ish things to get me by in the mean time though... but I'm also comfortable with SQL, so I do even more directly to the database...

As far as bulk uploads.. I feel your pain. It took me nearly three weeks to get all of mine uploaded in roughly 100 meg batches. Of course if I hadn't cared about things like setting the location and whatnot, it would have gone faster. That lack of a bulk update feature, ya see...

But I couldn't wait for the next release. I was already four months behind getting stuff posted (I was using BINS, and it just couldn't scale.. so I'd need an image management app to manage BINS..) so I fired up emacs and started hacking on the PO codebase.

Balint's accepted the majority of my patches, though he hasn't got back to me yet on the last one. (http://www.shaftnet.org/po/ if you want to see what I've done so far)

Privacy

pcharlan — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:23:30 +0000

I discovered a ".thumbnails" directory in my home directory the other day, containing thumbnails of everything I'd opened in the gimp for the last five months, including pics that my girlfriend would rather hadn't stayed on the hard drive unencrypted. I didn't know the gimp did that.

So a feature I'd look for in a photo management suite is that when I say something's gone, please don't leave any of it behind, and if it's not the only manager of the pic, don't leave anything behind between editing sessions.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

pizza — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:02:17 +0000

I used to use BINS, but unfortunately it doesn't scale too well. I gave up on it when it would take the better part of three hours to generate updated albums when all I did was move a few files around... But I did love the fact that it generated static HTML that needed nothing else to work.

I did submit a few patches to it over the last couple of years, but making it significantly faster would mean fundamental changes to how it works.. and the code makes my forebrain mutiny.

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

wjhenney — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:32:27 +0000

OK, thanks for clearing things up. I guess that with 6 billion potential
linux users in the world, then nobody's name is going to stay unique for
ever anyhow :)

kimdaba's strengths

wjhenney — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:17:06 +0000

Kimdaba seems to be great at what it does best (efficient tag- and time-based filtering of your image collection) but doesn't compare to digiKam as a general purpose image management app. What would be fantastic would be if kimdaba's features could be provided as a plug-in to be used by digikam. That way, we would have the best of both worlds.

LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications"

Digikam

AlbumShaper

Common irritations

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

The "UNIX" way

exif

gqview

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

Showimg

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Picasa

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

Looking For A Project?

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

re: Digikam Edit Comments

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

Picasa

Too slow - are you sure?

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

Common irritations

Raw support?

Too slow

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Privacy

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

digikam's printing is better than that

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

pity

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

gqview

Yes, Image *Management* apps.

Privacy

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to Image Management Applications

Dr Havoc and Mr Pennington

kimdaba's strengths

Yes, Image Management apps.

Yes, Image Management apps.

Yes, Image Management apps.

Yes, Image Management apps.

Yes, Image Management apps.