I installed digiKam in Mandriva 2009/KDE4 and all appeared to be OK but when I went to start it it threw its toys out of its pram.

What it wasn't telling me was that I needed to install exiv2 before it would work. I found that out by trying to reinstall the KDE3 version for Mandriva 2008 and then run it from the command line. I think the error I encountered first time round was because it needs exiv2 to read EXIF data for each photo as it is doing its scan.

In its default settings the new version of digiKam takes an age to get going because it scans for new items on start up and I have lots of photos for it to scan through. You can change that in the settings (Settings > Configure digiKam... and then scroll down to Miscellaneous at the bottom of the list).

It is still slow to get moving but once it is opened up it seems to work just as well as it always did.

--
Phil.