Since Blogger swallowed up my last attempts to review digiKam (KDE Photo Management software), I posted a short two-or-three paragraph mention of digiKam. But that wasn’t exactly fair to digiKam, so here’s another attempt at a review of digiKam.

I’ve been trying to find a decent photo album manager for Linux for a while. This is mainly due to my son Colin, who is so adorably cute that we have no choice but to take hundreds of pictures of. Categorizing, tagging and displaying that many photos is not an easy chore. Trying to do this by hand, or by using a file manager (a la Konqueror) is insane. Only a dedicated photo management package is going to fit the bill.

Enter digiKam. After playing with a number of other managers, I stumbled upon digiKam via a reference in a blog. The install is painless:

apt-get install digikam digikamimageplugins kipi-plugins

After the download (which was one of the larger downloads I’ve see via apt) and install, I fired up digiKam, and was immediately underwhelmed. The UI for digikam is definitely not impressive. Mind you, I’ve gotten used to the eyecandy provided by Paint Shop Photo Album and Picasa. Fortunately, I’m not one who gets hung up by how an app works. After my initial, wow, this looks really rough, I moved on to creating a new album.

Albums are simply directories under the Album directory (which you configure). The main screen has two panes. The left pane displays a list of albums. A thumbnail of one of the photos in the album serves as the album’s icon. Right-clicking the album allows you to do a variety of actions on all the photos in the album. One of my favorite actions – and one which I totally missed on my first attempted review – is Export to external Gallery. As in the excellent, open-source Gallery, web-based photo gallery project. More about this in a bit. Other actions include adding borders, changing size, renaming and finding duplicate photos in that album.

Clicking on an album displays thumbnails of all photos in the album in the right (main) panel of digikam. Thumbnails are displayed, along with filename or tags (depending on whether or not you’ve assigned tags to the pictures) and the date the photo was taken (assuming that the photo contains that information). Right-clicking on a photo here gives a number of available options. Some of the most useful include assigning a tag to a photo, editing the photos properties, renaming the photo, or even setting the photo as the KDE background(!). There are also photo editing options available, but editing the photo from this view is not optimal.

Clicking on a photo from the main frame opens up the photo in its own window. Depending on the size of the photo, it is opened either at full-size or scaled (still much larger than the thumbnail). The zoom level can be altered, of course. Editing the photo is much easier and more effective once it is in its own window and is sized so that details can be seen.

digiKam supports two plugin standards for photo manipulation. It has its own plugin standard which provides a number of photo manipulation choices. digiKam also supports KIPI plugins, which adds a dozen more choices. The results are a staggering number of transformations you can do to a photo. Want to change your color photo to black & white or sepia-tone? No problem. Solarize it? Gotcha covered. Emboss? That’s there too!

The KIPI plugins also provide other functionality, including allowing an album to be exported as an HTML album, or, as mentioned earlier, to an external Gallery. I ran digiKam through a quick exercise: I created a new album, copied a handful of photos into the album. I then used digiKam to touch up the photos, tag them and rename them. Then I had digiKam export the album to my Gallery. The results were very impressive. Function-wise, digiKam does everything that I need. I could not find anything at all to criticize about the process. Every step was easy and intuitive, and more importantly, worked as expected.

If you use digital photos in Linux and are interested at all in managing them, take a look at digiKam. Ignore the rough user interface, and actually work with it for a little while. You will be surprised at just how good this package is. Lord knows I was!