It’s been said that for a free software desktop to succeed it needs to address the needs of the average home user. Managing digital photographs is just one of those needs. Let’s see how one of the more popular free software photo management applications, digiKam, measures up.

Everyone is a photographer

Digital photography is now part and parcel of many home computer users’ lives and they are demanding more from their software. While professionals are more at home using packages like the GIMP (okay, it’s more likely Photoshop, but we can dream), the home user generally wants something half as complex to use but with two-thirds the capabilities.

The title on the digiKam website declares that it is “photo management for the masses”. That statement should tell you a lot about the aims of this accomplished application. It is written with photographers in mind and not just the professional.

digiKam “photo management for the masses”—that says a lot about its aims

Installation

Installing digiKam is easily done through package managers, such as Synaptic, Yum, etc. Pretty much any GNU/Linux distribution which has packages for KDE available will include a digiKam package. BSD users should also have a package available. In most of the cases I have found, the package is simply called “digikam”. On my Debian system, I also installed the “digikamimageplugins” package which provides many of the editing tools discussed later. Both of these have documentation packages that are very good, so I recommend them.

If your package manager doesn’t install gphoto2 automatically, then you’ll need this package as well. Also, if it is available, I would recommend installing the Kipi plugins package for extra functionality (more on that later). Finally, for those who like to get their hands a little dirtier, source tar balls can be downloaded from the digiKam site.

While digiKam is an official part of KDE, it can be run under other free desktops such as XFCE and GNOME (although for a GTK interface you might like to consider F-Spot). Of course, you may have to install some KDE libraries with it, but any package manager worthy of the name should take care of that.

Naturally, KDE is the preferred desktop for running digiKam, the capital K in the name being a clue, and it is under that desktop that I use it. This article is based on v0.92, which at the time of this writing is the latest version.

Getting photos from your camera

Of course, before you do anything else you need to download your photos from your camera into digiKam. Using the tried and tested free software principle of not reinventing the wheel, digiKam employs gphoto2 to handle the image capture side of things. A nice touch is that digiKam does this within its own interface meaning you are not forced to run one application then another just to manage your photos. This philosophy extends throughout digiKam and the result is a seamless set of very powerful but easy to use features.

Whilst I won’t go into the details of connecting specific devices to your desktop, I will give an overview. If you have never connected your digital camera to your desktop then I suggest you give it try. Many recent versions of GNU/Linux distributions have excellent support for USB devices and often just plugging in a device will result in that device appearing on your desktop.

If you have never connected your camera to your desktop then give it a try

digiKam will import images directly from a wide range of digital cameras, scanners and removable media. Even if yours is not directly listed you may well find it will work. Many low- to mid-range digital cameras connect as a USB mass storage device in much the same way as USB flash keys. If your camera has removable media, such as Compact Flash, Smart Media or XD cards, you may find it more convenient to use a card reader. Media connected via one of these USB devices invariably appear as a removable media icon on your KDE desktop. Another benefit of this approach is that it won’t run the batteries down on your camera.

The import images wizard

digiKam integrates excellently into the KDE desktop. This means that right clicking on a camera or removable media desktop icon will give you an option to “Download images with digiKam”. Either this, or using the Camera menu within digiKam, will bring you to the Import images wizard (figure 1). Here you will find thumbnails of all the image files on the camera or media you’ve selected. The programmers have put some considerable thought into making importing simple. This means that you don’t need to know exactly where or how your camera stores its images, the wizard finds all the photos on the media. From there it is a case of simply selecting the photos you require and clicking Download. You can download all the images or selected ones. The final step is to select the album you want to import into - either a new one or an existing one.

Figure 1: The import images wizard

Sorting it all out

Albums will be a familiar concept to anyone who has used other photo management software. They provide a simple concept to managing photos with an obvious link to the “good old days” of traditional photography.

digiKam’s albums are filed in a hierarchical structure below what it calls “My albums”. This is a top level folder which you set up when you first run digiKam via the first-run wizard. As a matter of fact, what is called an album within digiKam is simply a folder within the underlying file system. I have laid a digiKam snapshot alongside a Konqueror window showing the underlying file system structure (figure 2).

Figure 2: Albums in digiKam and the underlying file system structure