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josephj 08-16-2008 11:57 PM

Managing Pictures on Linux
 
Solved!

I'm new to digital cameras. I have several thousand images (photos)
loaded to my hard disk from my camera.

I want to select a subset for printing, etc.

I'm running kubuntu hardy on a Centrino Duo notebook.

In Picasa, it does what I want, but the album viewer pane acts like a web page which makes scrolling and locating pictures really annoying.
The nice thing about Picasa is that it doesn't store pictures. It just points to them so if you delete one, you're just deleting it out of Picasa, not off your disk. It does not appear to have a search function.

I'm looking into Digikam. It displays the pictures sanely and lets you search them in a normal (good) way, but treats them as the actual files. If you delete one, it's totally gone. I can deal with that, but how do I select some for printing?

I tried the following (in Digikam):
I created a whole album of pictures that I want to print a subset of. These are copies, so deleting some would be OK (but not optimal).

I set a tag on all of them called "Print". I can then go through and remove this tag from any I don't want to print.

I created a search on the album that displays all the pictures with the "Print" tag set. That works, but I can't see any way to copy just those images to somewhere else like a memory stick or CD to take to a photo shop.

I also attempted to install f-spot, but it has some problems working under kde - at least on my system - and is not very usable at the moment.

I just installed gqview, but I can't see how to get it to display a lot of thumbnails at once - just a vertical list.

Any ideas on how to tackle this would be appreciated. I want to settle on one image manager and get back to managing my pictures.

TIA

Joe

pixellany 08-17-2008 03:41 AM

You already know more than most people here!!

I use Digikam + GIMP. I print in one of two ways:
--one at a time, In GIMP, with at least some editing
--copy a whole bunch to CD and take to a camera store
Quote:

I'm new to digital cameras. I have several thousand images (photos)
loaded to my hard disk from my camera.
I hope you have a good backup system in place.....I use TWO USB drives, and I'm still nervous. I plan to burn some DVDs also.

josephj 08-19-2008 07:28 PM

Thanks. It's the "copy a whole bunch" part that I don't get. In digikam, I don't see how to select a subset of pictures, e.g. those between two dates or those with a particular tag *and* then export or save that group to another location such as a CDROM. As stated above, I was able to select pictures successfully, but I couldn't figure out how to do anything with them once they were selected.

Any ideas?

Joe

josephj 07-13-2009 06:16 PM

Solved!
 
I discovered kphotoalbum! It does almost everything I want the way I want it done, or better. It just builds a database of your pictures (indexes) without actually copying or moving the actual photos.

Once the photos are in kpa, you then add multiple attributes called tags to each picture so you can search for them. When you find them, you can drag and drop them to a file folder or even to a konsole window or do other things with them as a group.

Selecting photos is done the way I always wanted selection to work, but nobody else implemented. If you select one picture and then move down and shift-select another, all the ones in between get selected - no hassling with only certain columns getting selected like in konqueror, etc. Then, if you ctrl-select another picture, move further down and shift-select another one, that gets added to your selection instead of replacing it the way most other apps do. This makes it easy to select a large number of pictures at one time to add the same tags to all of them at once. This vastly speeds up the manual tagging process.

The only thing I really miss is multiple photo albums like picasa has. But I figured out a way to simulate them. All you have to do is create a tag such as "album01" and then add that tag to all the pictures you want in that album. Then you just search for that tag and you have them all for whatever you want to do next.

kpa has many other features and I'm just beginning to explore them.

Currently, kpa will only build a library of pictures from one directory and its subdirectories, but that limitation is being worked on.

Joe

pixellany 07-13-2009 10:12 PM

Wow---and it only took you 11 months.......;)

Seriously, we're glad that you found peace with this.

soupnsandwich 07-24-2009 04:42 PM

Guys DigiKam will do all you want and much more...BUT you need to install the "kipi" plugins for it. Onces that's installed you will have many many more features and options including selecting a set of images, "Email images" will automaticly resize complile, open up your email client, and attach the images all in one motion. All you have to do is add the address to who you want to send it to.
Kipi plugins does a lot more than just that including batch processing, HTML galleries that can be viewed in a web browser...and tons more.

For our OEM project we looked into lots of photo management programs and nothing really came close to DigiKam (except for "FSpot" for Gnome) with the kipi plugins.

Hope that 2 cents of info helps.

Soup

josephj 07-24-2009 04:54 PM

digicam questions
 
I briefly tried digicam awhile ago.

Can it index existing pictures on disk or does it have to copy them into its own library/folder? (I seem to remember it copied them all.)

How does it handle more than one album of pictures (something kphotoalbum doesn't do very well - at least not directly)?

Why did you choose it over kphotoalbum?

Joe

soupnsandwich 07-24-2009 10:54 PM

Yes it does index existing pictures...you just need to tell it where to look. DigiKam does not create it's own directory or move pictures into any particular directory. It's default directory is "Pictures" but that can be changed through it's "Configure DigiKam" menu selection.

DigiKam has a master album called "My Albums" but it's nothing more than a virtual folder.

http://imagebin.ca/view/Nm2VHt.html

The albums are endless as far as where you create them. As many as you want. If it's set up correctly it will do just about everything for you when importing from a digital cameras. It will show all pictures on the media then by default all images are selected. Click "Download" and choose "Download All". It will then show the album tree and you can click "Add Album" and choose where in the existing hierarchy of albums you want it. It can be within any existing album or placed in the "My Albums" which is the top level of the your album tree. With the Kipi plugin (which are very necessary from what what most people want to do) there much more that becomes available.

http://imagebin.ca/view/eCsbcx-A.html

http://imagebin.ca/view/QZs5UL.html

Joe I've spent about a full 2 months evaluating "Photo Manager" apps...Kphotoalbum really isn't in the same realm as Digikam. The only other one that gave me a glimpse of hope was Gnome's Fspot. This program is a bit strange in that the pictures are thrown into one big "album" and the only real way to organize them is through tagging of the pictures themselves. At least while using the Fspot app itself. The reality is that it creates a "Photos" folder and added everything to the current day that the pictures where downloaded to the computer....that sounds great...except as a user using Fspot you don't see that side. Instead it shows a timeline when the pictures where taken....which is not very intuitive.

My choice is DigiKam because it automates many task that the average person over 50 are not likely to have an easy task doing. Example is the email pictures feature. It does everything for the end user. Just select the picture you want to email, go to "Image" menu and "email images". It open a dialog that allows you to initially set your email client, the physical size of the pictures, the "quality" of the pictures, the maximum email file size limit and some other very handy presets. The default screen though shows the pictures that are to be sent and the options to add additional images. Clicking the "OK" button opens the email client, resizes the pictures, making sure to keep the overall size under the limits that you set and then attaches them to the compose window of your email client. I can't tell you how far that goes with the end user. The KIPI plugin for DigiKam make all the "extra" features possible.

http://imagebin.ca/view/1_UlQpn.html

http://imagebin.ca/view/D5_a8kH.html

I choose DigiKam as an OEM because we produce many computers for end users and with tons of testing and evaluating it's the one of the best out there. It can also be tweaked to be even more user friendly. Example of that is...by default, clicking on a picture open the picture by itself to you can view it better instead of with the rest of the albums picture...but you can configure it so that when you click on a picture it places DigiKam in edit mode automatically....or in Light Table mode. You get the idea.

http://imagebin.ca/view/ZLJWxkv.html

http://imagebin.ca/view/UIGcdl.html

I hope this helps with your quest for a decent photo manager Joe. I use it for myself...but I choose it on a development level for our OS and our end users.

Soup

josephj 07-28-2009 10:47 AM

DigiKam revisited
 
Wow! Thanks for the very detailed reply. I will go back and review DigiKam carefully. I just hope it can import tags from Kphotoalbum.
I have over 7000 tagged pictures and more coming all the time!

Joe

soupnsandwich 07-28-2009 02:17 PM

Oh no problem, glad I could shed some light.

I think it will (import the tags), but I'm not sure. Fspots tags worked semi ok in Digikam.

Make sure you obtain the Kipi plugins..that's the key to getting all those extra features.
I've never used DigiKam on Kubuntu but the Kipi plugins must be available.

Soup


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