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.
v6.1
The New Plugins Interface “DPlugins”
With 6.0.0, digiKam project has already left the KIPI plugins support and embedded all tools as native solutions without easly permitting to customize and extend the application. digiKam 5.9.0 was the last version supporting KIPI after more than 15 years, and less and less support outside of the digiKam project. It’s time to turn the page now and to reload the story with a new plugin interface more powerful, more adjusted to all digiKam main tools, with an extended support to Showfoto, and without losing legacy features.
Don’t be afraid, you will loose nothing and gain more power with this new plugins interface, named “DPlugins” for… “digiKam Plugins” of course.
Where the KIPI tools were limited to the Main Album View in digiKam, DPlugins can be used everywhere, e.g. in Image Editor, Light Table, Showfoto, and of course the Album View. This include all Generic tools to import/export items or edit metadata, but wait a minute… more than that also Image Editor re-touch tools (colors editing, Transforms, Decorate, Effects, etc.), and wait a second… still more Batch Queue Manager tools to process many files at once. Now you will get a feeling of the huge difference to the older KIPI solution: digiKam becomes really open and extensible as it must do since a very long time, where KIPI never achieve this task.
The list of plugins is already very long, and we work hard to make all the features ready to use in only 2 months.
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