I've spent hours (months?) scouring these wonderful forums and can't seem to find an answer to this one...

My wife switched from Windoze XP to Ubuntu 8.04 a couple years ago, and has been almost completely satisfied with the switch. Beyond basic desktop user functions, the most important task she manages is pulling photos and videos off our digital camera. On Win, she was very happy using Picasa, however, the Linux version ignores all video files--does not pull them off the camera, does not display thumbnails, does not tag, etc.

Currently, I have a script to easily pull the files off the camera and file them on her hard drive, but she's very frustrated that they do not show up in Picasa. She is ready for me to install a WinXP VM, simply to pull photos and videos off our camera. This solution is unacceptable to me.

So, I ask you all, is there a Linux application that will run on Ubuntu 10.04 (Gnome desktop) that can do the following reasonably well?

• Move photos AND videos from digital camera to hard drive (via USB)
• Organize photos AND videos in one app
• Provide thumbnails of videos and either play clip/preview or at least simply open video player to play

I've heard good stuff about F-Spot and digiKam, but it appears neither handles videos as I'm suggesting--just photo files. It also appears digiKam is for KDE, not GNOME, no?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Digikam is the best photo management apps on Linux. It is a bit overkill for many users (compositing, advanced plugins, 1000000 option, 3 modes) but it is great once you master it. It is not intended for video files, but it will handle them anyway, so it should meet your needs.

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+1 for DigiKam.

You should be able to run KDE apps on Gnome and vice-versa.
All you need is to have the KDE libraries installed which you probably do.

HTH

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Thank you both, Elv13 and rkski, for the quick replies. I'll give DigiKam a try.

Elv13: you mention that "it is not intended for video files, but it will handle them." Do you know if I can get F-Spot to handle them in a similar fashion or not? Thanks.

Handling Video is easier in KDE (about 3 line of code) than with GTK+GStreamer (500), it is why KDE applications doesn't care about those little extra, the classical "developer time arguments" is not valid. I don't use F-Spot, Digikam is highly superior, so I don't care about alternatives.

hello,

how did you manager to convert jpg photos into mpeg movies for dvd player.

regds
wasi