other links ...
superkaramba ...
linux ...
weather ...
digital cameras ...
are all the rage now ...
and even though I've got one, I can't claim to be anything but a complete hack in terms of using one. I wouldn't know a light meter from a light lunch. However, I have been round the traps in terms of useful software, for playing with digital images on linux and have some views on what's good and what's not. There are also some real gems out there, which don't seem to be very well known. It took me a while to find them, and by reading this, I may just save you some time.
what I wanted ...
Although I'm just a happy snapper, I am a very happy snapper, and snap a lot. That's the great thing about digital cameras, you can snap like crazy, because bad photos just get dumped - you don't have to pay to develop them to find out they're bad. So I've got thousands of images now. I really needed some software to help me manage them.
What I wanted was the ability to organise them. I didn't want to use folders, because I don't remember things by date, or place. I remember things by people - who was there, and occasions - birthday, christmas, holiday, and it's impossible to organise photos in folders that way. I also needed to be able to easily find images using a number of criteria, and then email them to people - at a file size where they don't have a hernia on dialup; and without having to risk my originals by compressing the wrong file. The other thing I needed was the ability to remove red-eye without having to use the GIMP. Don't get me wrong, the GIMP is great, but when you've got 1000 evil red eyes to purify, the GIMP is it's own form of purgatory.
organisation ...
So I went hunting, as you do. And in the early days I found a program called pixie plus made by a very grumpy developer whose name I've forgotten. This was a nice program, but it didn't do a lot more than konqueror, and didn't do any of the things I was looking for. After a long time hunting, I decided to do my own thing, and wrote some python code that allowed me to tag images with multiple keywords, including dates, people, places and events. This worked well, although it was an ugly hack, and my wife couldn't fathom it. I used that for a while, and then I found it. The holy grail of what I was looking for - kimdaba. This software did exactly what I wanted in terms of managing and searching for photos. It stored multiple keywords, and allowed you to search them in any combination - fast. Searching for a single photo out of 5000 was almost instantaneous, and invariably bang on the money. There is an old saying "garbage in, garbage out", however with little effort you can be mining pure gold with kimdaba. It also allows you to insert keywords for multiple images at the same time, which makes tagging images very very fast.
However, I also use digikam (see below), and I was getting sick of using two applications for downloading images off the camera, and editing them - although kimdaba has a lot of those functions by using the common set of plugins available for both applications. Also, the kimdaba interface is a little challenging. The latest version of digikam has come to my rescue. As of version 0.7, the image tag functionality has improved greatly. Tags are now recorded in an sqlite database, and you can attache multiple tags to images - much like kimdaba. Version 0.7 also adds a timeline interface as well for those who like to search by date. Digikam 0.7 is now a fantastic all-in-one application for image editing/management/cataloging.
email and red-eye ...
But it didn't solve my email and red-eye problem (at least immediately). It took a while, and then a whole lot of image viewers got together, and created a plugin framework that allowed plugins created for digikam to be used in any of those image viewers. This was the gpl operating at its absolute finest and produced something called KIPI. Now I had a whole lot of plugins in kimdaba, one of which allowed me to resize, recompress, and email images that I'd searched and found - without affecting the original. I was almost there.
There was still one thing I needed and that was to eliminate red-eye. There was no red-eye plugin for KIPI, however, the inspiration for that project, digikam had what I was after. It had an image editor, which allowed you to zoom in, select an area, and then apply two levels of red-eye removal. That simple. I managed to de-red-eye about 500 photos in a two hour marathon. I was very happy. Digikam also had a lot of other features, that I never knew I needed, but now use all the time.
conclusion ...
Digikam and kimdaba, along with k3b should be the killer apps that could move people from windows to the linux desktop. I've seen the paltry offerings that the camera companies ship with their cameras, and the pay offerings by some of the big software names, but they all seem to be missing one or two features that these two have.