digiKam 8.1

digiKam is intended to help you manage your photo collections. In this respect, the tool lets you not only view and organize the images but also enhance and share them. The program has a neat interface and I am sure you will soon figure out how to use it.

The utility works by organizing your photos in albums and it supports importing files from local folders and connected devices. Unfortunately, the importing process may take a while, and in the meantime your system’s performance may be affected. The albums preserve the original folder structure and you can easily navigate through them. Moreover, to facilitate finding the desired photos, you can organize them by title or date. Likewise, it is possible to use the metadata or add and customize tags.

Luckily, the product comes with a built-in image editor, which supports not only basic editing operations as cropping and resizing, but also others such as color adjustment, restoration, noise reduction and decoration. What is more, these operations can be performed on batches of files thanks to the Batch Queue Manager.

An important part of collecting photos has to do with sharing them with friends, family members and colleagues. Good news is that digiKam supports posting your photographs in various social networks, such as Flickr, Picasa and Facebook. Likewise, it can create instant slideshows with the selected pictures. Finally, it is good to know that you can export the database to other photo managing programs.

To conclude, digiKam is a powerful tool with multiple features. Not only that, the program supports expanding its capabilities by installing plugins. Conveniently, the product is open source and it will not cost you a dime to use it.