digkam alternatives?
 

I'm trying to find an alternative to digikam for a couple of non-technical users. They need a graphical way of managing the
photos on their cameras; i.e copy / move / deleting from camera; they are used to the 'gimp' so they are comfortable with some image editing.

I have been building digikam for them but it has become too much of a bother with dependencies, and it has become very slow for batch conversions.

So the basic requirements are:
- graphical frontend with similar (but not all) functions to digikam
- stable camera interface (preferably libgphoto2)
- no overkill dependencies like mysql, opencv, json, etc
- gtk+2/3, qt, or kdelibs requirements are OK
- editor which supports crop, aspect-ratio crop, resize, rotate
- ability to search for metadata in images
- ability to embed metadata in images
- batch jobs to rename and write metadata

I've read about a number of alternatives and must discount any gnome packages, even though look really good.

TIA.

Gwenview?

Yes thanks I forgot about gwenview. Last year we tried it but the camera (sony I forget the model) wasn't recognized whereas with digikam it was.
We'll try it again, but I would still like to try any other alternatives.

Hi,


Gthumb or fotoxx. These are the ones I first install after a new slack release.

My tuppence..

Marcel

Gwenview supports kipi-plugins too. For basic photo management, gwenview probably is good enough for most folks.

I like Gwenview. It is my favorite photo viewer for Linux, BUT if you want to use the kipi-plugins, you now have to install, grrrrr.... digiKam.

I didn't know that was the case now. :( Just got to wonder about developers who think like that. :banghead:

Darktable? http://www.darktable.org/

I use AlienBob's Rawtherapee package and GIMP (especially now that it can handle 16 bit PNGs) - there's a newer version of Rawtherapee available too if you fancy compiling it.

http://rawtherapee.com/blog/features

Rawtherapee's dependencies are all Slackbuilds so it's easy to sort them out on sbopkg.

Exiftool is great for your metadata - very handy tool to have.

EDIT I also do what gracien below does too for extracting the images - gphoto2 into the relevant directory (just execute the command from there).

I then rename my RAW files with exiftools to the date and time the image was taken.


http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

Same situation here (non-technical users). My solution was to split the process :

- bash script to import files from camera (basically : gphoto2 --auto-detect and gphoto2 --get-all-files), and a nice XFCE launcher for the script.
gtkam may be a better solution but I had no luck with it.

- gthumb (from slackbuild).

Yep. Couldn't agree more!
As the kipi-plugins are designed to be used by at least two other KDE applications, it is, IMO, and as I've said elsewhere, a thinly disguised attempt at forcing people to use digiKam.

Shotwell from SBo works pretty well although it might not be able to do everything on your list.

Tried fotoxx looks good but users are not impressed.

gthumb looks like it could be THE choice but... I built/installed prequisite
gnome-doc-utils (v0.8.0) and then gthumb (v3.0.1), but when ran gthumb i got the
following error:
-----------------------
GLib-GIO-Message: Using the 'memory' GSettings backend. Your settings will not be saved or shared with other applications.

(gthumb:20032): GLib-GIO-ERROR **: Settings schema 'org.gnome.gthumb.browser' is not installed
-----------------------

Now I installed to /usr/local so the schemas were stored in:
/usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas

and 'org.gnome.gthumb.browser' is not there.

This is the same problem as reported in
http://web.archiveorange.com/archive...b1rEwgMw9xYmFy
what 'scares' me is the last entry :-)
"Ok, found the problem/solution.
I had to rebuild the gschemas.compiled with glib-compile-schemas.
Now gthumb-3.0.0 works."

Any idea how to correct this? do you have that file in the 'schemas' dir?

I've tried building the latest gthumb v3.2.1 but configure fails (requires 'itstool')
and I refuse to continue down that dependency path :-)

I would also recommend to use shotwell.
If you like you can reuse your batchscripts to add new pics but you can also use shotwell (properties).
Only disadvantage I see: no hirachical tags.

---------- Post added 04-17-13 at 01:02 PM ----------

I would also recommend to use shotwell.
If you like you can reuse your batchscripts to add new pics but you can also use shotwell (properties).
Only disadvantage I see: no hirachical tags.

I like Gwenview, too, but it doesn't handle RAW images. That's why I use Geeqie quite often, and I am always impressed, how fast it is. So Geeqie is my recommendation for previewing photos and getting them from a camera onto the computer.

gargamel

There is a "RAW image converter" among the kipi-plugins so apparently Gwenview can now handle RAW images (?).

http://gwenview.sourceforge.net/overview

http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kipi/

Fantastic, I never knew that about geeqie. I'm using v1.1 (from slackware 14.0) and I
cannot see how one interfaces with a camera.
How do you connect to camera and copy/move/delete images?
Thanks.

Your camera doesn't show up on the desktop as a mass storage device (or external hard drive) when you plug it into a USB port?

Some do, many don't. AFAIK for many cameras you need a specific driver to read and write from the camera.

Which is why I am wondering, why aren't you using a card reader?

It does but I've never used it that way, I've always used digikam to connect
to camera so I guess I came to expect that is the only way to go.
live and learn :-)
thanks.

And this also explains, how I use Geeqie to access photos on a camera. ;)

gargamel

I've read this, too, but it's not working here, by default. I have Slackware64-current with all updates up to now and Digikam 3.1.0, so kipi-plugins are there. But I cannot open RAW files with Gwenview. BTW, Konqueror and Dolphin do show thumbnails of RAW images.

gargamel

BTW, AFAIK Geeqie also supports PTP mode. Not sure, if it can do MTP by default, which is used by many new smartphones, but with mtpfs from SBo installed it should work, too. But the easiest is always USB mass storage mode, IMHO, if your device supports it.

gargamel

Yes, you are correct. I downloaded a RAW file from the net and tried to open it with Gwenview, but it didn't work. Just about every other graphics app on my system will open it, but not Gwenview. So, I went looking around the 'Net for the "solution" and stumbled across this from, IIRC, the Gwenview author:

http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=213&t=101042

Confirms what I've thought all along. Another reason not to bother installing KDE.

Interesting! I've never searched for a solution, because stock Slackware already includes several programs for displaying and converting RAW images. Regarding KDE: Digikam is considered one of the best photo managers, at all, even when compared to commecial software.

And there is a couple of other Qt programs not requiring KDE. I think I already mentioned Photivo, and there's also Photo, as an image viewer.

gargamel

I don't think this is correct. I am pretty sure Geeqie does not support PTP (or MTP) at all, nor does it sound like the developers want to do anything in that direction. Their scope is image viewing and image management. Do you have a reference for geeqie + PTP?

If you have a camera talks USB mass storage protocol, you can just mount it and access it from anything (including PTP). If you have a camera (e.g. Canon) that does PTP not mass storage, you need something in between Geeqie or Gimp and the camera. That could be command-line gphoto2 (which I use), or gphotofs (which I tried, mounts a PTP device as a file system). Rumor has it that the gvfs-gphoto2 thing we see on our Slackware 14 does this too, but I've never had any success with it.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/geeqie/Sourceforge site for Geeqie:

The development is focused on features for photo collection maintenance: raw format, Exif/IPTC/XMP metadata and integration with programs like UFraw, ImageMagick, Gimp, gPhoto or ExifTo.

So Geeqie uses gPhoto for PTP access (like many other programs).

gargamel