Windows and OS-X have a wealth of excellent digital photo albums, including Picasa, Paint Shop Photo Album and iPhoto. I’ve been searching for an equivalent photo manager for Linux, and I think I have found it: digiKam – KDE Photo Management. digiKam is a surprisingly slick photo album package. It supports album management, photo touchup, tags and the KIPI plugin standard.
digiKam is immediately accessible to anyone who has used a photo album package before. Directories are listed as albums, double-clicking an album shows the photos within it. Photos can be tagged, captioned and edited from there.
Supporting KIPI is a very good thing. This allows a number of photo manipulation filters to be used, and more to be easily added in the future without having to upgrade digiKam.
The user interface is definitely rough compared to digiKam’s closed-source cousins, but that’s to be expected. And I’m not a big eye candy guy. I prefer function over form, and digiKam provides almost all the function I need.
I must now go and add something to digiKam’s wishlist: Gallery access.