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.
v2.1 [Sep 21, 2011]
The latest release offers new features and improvements, one of the most exciting tools in this release is the panorama tool. Which is simple and quite effective.
NEW FEATURES:
- CameraGUI : camera items thumbnails are processed on the fly. Connection to camera device is faster.
- CameraGUI : Sort of items by date is possible with photo taken quickly (less than 1s).
- CameraGUI : New option to setup a default target album to download items from camera device.
- CameraGUI : New option to download new items in just one click.
- CameraGUI : New option to filter icon-view by type mime.
- Preview : New option to show/hide information over preview canvas.
BUGFIXES:
- 001 ==> 218365 : Show icon thumbs when loaded and not only after all were read.
- 002 ==> 278526 : No picture is displayed in the Album View.
- 003 ==> 245079 : Let the user download all before thumbnails are generated.
- 004 ==> 278033 : Cannot set jpeg compression ratio (or any other save options) when exporting image.
- 005 ==> 278966 : Building the unittests fails when using external libpgf.
- 006 ==> 199985 : digiKam, import, writing to sd card, bad folders.
- 007 ==> 261627 : GNOME says "No applications found" ignoring digikam.
- 008 ==> 251900 : Preview of RAW images missing.
- 009 ==> 260669 : Images on camera always marked as new.
- 010 ==> 246336 : Ordering incorrect.
- 011 ==> 264123 : digiKam freezes when creating thumbnails in the import dialog (from a memory stick).
- 012 ==> 199197 : Can't import pictures from camera.
- 013 ==> 181521 : NEF's in descending order, AVI in ascending order in import from SD-card.
- 014 ==> 221457 : digiKam camera download - dates are not preserved.
- 015 ==> 229543 : Video exif info not found during import and renaming.
- 016 ==> 265243 : Series of AVIs imported with the same (incorrect) time.
- 017 ==> 199913 : Creation date is changed when converting to png.
- 018 ==> 190717 : Camera movie files dates not used for date based sub folder name.
- 019 ==> 246337 : Changing sort order forces thumbnail regeneration.
- 020 ==> 256776 : digiKam leaves ".digikam-exifrotate" files etc. on harddisk.
- 021 ==> 237810 : Wrong date when renaming downloaded pictures.
- 022 ==> 233621 : Importing from Nikon Coolpix P90 ignores date/time of the images and uses 31-12-1969 instead.
- 023 ==> 160496 : No disk space reported when importing pictures.
- 024 ==> 184439 : Closing the "USB DISK DOWNLOAD from DISK" window updates the digikam folder view.
- 025 ==> 253268 : digiKam crashes when starting to download pictures.
- 026 ==> 216492 : Camera interface upload can't select a movie only image.
- 027 ==> 274199 : digiKam crashed when using "inpainting" tool.
- 028 ==> 278320 : Crash with "-graphicssystem raster".
- 029 ==> 279551 : Wrong window title when deleting a search.
- 030 ==> 271030 : Windows Live Photo Gallery people tagging Compatibility.
- 031 ==> 279549 : Lighttable gets automatically filled on digiKam start.
- 032 ==> 279696 : Building the unittests of libkgeomap fails.
- 033 ==> 279713 : Libmediawiki tries to install test files (patch attached).
- 034 ==> 236394 : Import from camera using cable is slow and previously imported video files are not flagged.
- 035 ==> 261871 : digiKam import of Nikon D7000 images very slow.
- 036 ==> 243760 : Import *listing* from "Canon PowerShot G5 (normal mode)" takes very long.
- 037 ==> 246401 : Improve date based sort of camera interface: use more time precision from Exif when shots are taken with less than 1s.
- 038 ==> 266317 : Nepomuk Service Stub (nepomukservicestub) crashes in libdigikamdatabase.so.1 when syncing tags to nepomuk.
- 039 ==> 269373 : Adding face tag to large amount of pictures fails.
- 040 ==> 225759 : JPG image size = 0 byte, when transfer occurs from my camera to my NAS.
- 041 ==> 202641 : Import images - always increase renaming counter by number of images imported.
- 042 ==> 189903 : Allow default Target Album for Image Download.
- 043 ==> 259861 : One-click "Download New Items".
- 044 ==> 144227 : Allow for fully customized album names when importing.
- 045 ==> 279402 : Focus textbox for identifying faces gets lost too easily (and other issues).
- 046 ==> 277796 : Build failure in the dcraw_emu sample.
- 047 ==> 280240 : digiKam crash when attempting to view slideshow.
- 048 ==> 280517 : Moving photo from an album to another leads to loose face tags.
- 049 ==> 280101 : Patch: Add option to hide icons and text in preview.
- 050 ==> 279183 : Themes configuration dialogue does not open.
- 051 ==> 257806 : Images imported from backup card filtering icon-view [patch].
- 052 ==> 272143 : Remove the "a tool to" prefix in the BQM tools description.
- 053 ==> 281116 : Wish: Customisable date format in auto creation of albums.
- 054 ==> 277935 : Rename libkmap to libkgeomap and move it to extragear/libs.
- 055 ==> 264412 : Crash when opening a directory.
- 056 ==> 264638 : Stuck when cancelling rename/overwrite dialog in batch queue manager.
- 057 ==> 276061 : "Save (as new version)" is not enabled right after importing a RAW picture.
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