apt-get install

Linux.com continues their fun series of application comparison. This time up: Top Linux photo managers side-by-side:

Of the photo-management landscape looks bleak so far, don’t give up yet — there are alternatives. I am a big fan of GQview, a GTK-based image viewer that offers fewer features than either DigiKam or F-Spot, but in practice works better. It supports keyword tagging, collection management, Exif metadata, and sophisticated searches, and does not force you into its own way of organizing your image library. And it is incredibly fast — by far the fastest of the applications mentioned in this article.

Interestingly enough, Linux.com quickly rules out the top two (digiKam and F-Spot) as incomplete and inconsistent (or, in other words, buggy). Which might be a little unfair. digiKam is a pretty damned fine piece of software. Yes, it does have some rigid design philosophies (for example, organization is done via Albums/Folders, not individual pics). But once you get the hang of it, it’s relatively easy to use. And thanks to its use of the KIPI plugin interface, it’s pretty powerful, too.

I tend to keep flirting with Picasa for Linux. I’ve brought it home a few times, but continue to have problems with it. Part of the problem might be the size of our digital photo collection. But that can’t be all of it. I dunno… I’m tending to think that I’ll never use it. At least, not until Google comes out with a Linux-native version.