Edit photos in Linux with Digikam
There’s nothing quite like digiKam for all-round photo mastery. Adam Oxford gets you started with this comprehensive tool.
Gnome’s default photography tools are a disaster. The ageing Shotwell is OK, but inclined to hang if you ask it to deal with more than a couple of year’s archives, and the new Photos has a mind of its own when it comes to building a navigable archive. Gnome users who are serious about their photography can draw upon a hotchpotch of decent tools, but nothing comes close to the joy that’s expressed by their KDE-preferring peers who use digiKam.
digiKam is unique not just in the Linux world, but pretty much in all of computing for its comprehensive approach to photo management. Some software is good at RAW (raw) conversion, some is good for building a navigable library of thumbnails. Only digiKam has it all, from lightbox to facial recognition and even a ‘fuzzy search’ tool for looking up similar photos to the one you’re looking at now.
It’s phenomenal, and it’s also — at first glance — a touch intimidating. Here’s how to get started.
DOWNLOAD THE UPDATE
At the time of writing, the latest version of digiKam is 5.6.0. It’s a recent update, though, so your repository is probably stuck at 5.5.0. There are a couple of features in the newer code that you’ll want, specifically the ability to build HTML galleries and upload them directly from digiKam and to edit together photo slideshows. In Kubuntu, you can install the update by going to Konsole and entering:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip5/extra sudo apt update sudo apt install digikam
The first time you run digiKam, it’ll take you through a set-up wizard. For the most part, you won’t want to change any of the default options, but you will want to tell digiKam where you keep your images. This could be in /home/user/Pictures, or it could be in a separate drive with an archive built up over the years.
digiKam will also need to build a few database files, which can be saved in the default location or somewhere else. If you do want to move it, make sure it’s not on a removable or networked drive.
On its first run, digiKam will begin thumbnailing and sorting all the images in the location you set.
FINDING YOUR WAY AROUND
For the most part, digiKam is straightforward to navigate. On the left-hand side of the screen, there’s a vertical icon menu that selects how you want to search for images. These are based on the metadata of the images in your library. On the right, there’s another vertical menu that enables you to manipulate the currently selected of image or images.
When you select an option from the left or right, it’ll open a pane on that side of the main digiKam window that can be hidden by clicking again. The top set of icons controls what you see in the main pane, or open up separate windows for the Light Table and Image Editor.
The interface has a few odd quirks you’ll need to be wary of. For example, there are three buttons called Map, one on the right, one on the top and one on the left. The left is to search for images with geolocation tags in their metadata; the one on the right is to edit the metadata of the currently selected image. The top one should be similar to the one on the left, but operates in the main pane, but, in our testing, is pretty buggy. There’s also some repetition: the Tools button on the right is almost, but not quite, identical to the Tools menu in the top bar.
As well as maps, there are other fun features you can play around with at your leisure. There’s an experimental feature for automatically recognising faces in your archive, and a ‘Fuzzy’ search with which you can draw a very rough outline of what a photo looks like in your memory, and test digiKam’s ability to find it from your doodle. More usefully, Fuzzy search can be used to find images similar to, or duplicates of, the one you’re currently looking at.
In order to use the Fuzzy search function, digiKam will need to fingerprint all the images in your library, which can take a long time if you have a lot of shots.
Realistically, however, of all the navigation functions on the left the ones you’re most likely to use are Albums, Labels, Tags and Dates. Labels, Tags and Dates are based on metadata captured from the images themselves, and Timeline is effectively the same as Dates, but uses a graph instead of a folder tree to sort images by date captured.
The Albums view is a blend of a file browser and a virtual album library.
There are two ways to get images into digiKam. If you have a large library of images already on your hard drive sorted into meaningful folders (such as Year/Date/Location), the easiest way to import them is to add your Pictures folder as an Album. This can be done either in the set-up wizard or by going to ‘Import > Add folder’ and then selecting ‘Pictures > New album > Pictures’.
Now, whenever you add a new folder to your Pictures folder on your hard drive, by copying it over from your camera for example, digiKam will update its library.
If you want to use digiKam to import images directly from a camera or SD card, just connect them to your PC via USB (or a built-in card reader) and use the Import menu to pull the photos over. DigiKam doesn’t use virtual albums, so if you tell it to import pictures to an album it’ll make copies in that physical location. That’s fine if you’re importing from a camera, but could see you fill a hard drive with duplicates if you already have the pics on your PC already.
WORKING WITH YOUR PHOTOS
Once you’ve got to grips with importing and sorting images, the main image pane should start to make more sense. Call up a file location, date, search or tag in the navigator and all the images linked to that will appear as a thumbnail grid in the centre pane.
Using the top icons, you can also view this list in a row-by-row format by clicking ‘Table’ or on a map, but realistically, the two views you’ll use most are Thumbnails and Preview. Preview shows the currently selected image with the rest of the folder as a film strip at the top, while Thumbnail is a grid of images. You can change between the two views quickly by clicking the selected image.
By default, there’s a lot of information in the Thumbnail view. Each thumbnail includes the image name, rating, tags, format, caption, description and label below it, as well as some basic editing tools for rotating the view above. Unless you’re an aspiring archivist, it’s unlikely that you’ll use all of these all of the time.
Typically, you might reference an image by filename, label and tags, for example. Without adding the rest of the information to all the images, it’s going to leave a lot of blank space reserved for that information. You can tighten up this view by going to ‘Settings > Configure digiKam’. Under the Views tag, you can customise the information that appears underneath each image. You’ll most likely want to restrict this to the filename, rating and label. Now select Tooltips. In the Icon Items tab, you can make all of the other information about the picture that you might want appear when you mouse over a thumbnail.
SORTING YOUR COLLECTION
DigiKam will enable you to edit any part of the metadata stored as part of an image, right down to the type of camera used to take the shot, and the lens settings. Select an image and go to ‘Item > Edit Metadata’. This is more useful if you want to scrub metadata from a shot for privacy reasons than if you want to fool your friends into thinking you own a $10,000 camera by changing the EXIF information. From the same Item menu, you can also (more usefully) add geolocation data if it’s not been written in by your camera.
You can also view the metadata for a particular image using the Properties and Metadata menus on the right, but these won’t enable you to make any changes to an image.
The three main types of metadata that you will want to edit, however, are Tags, Ratings and Labels. Each has a key role to play when building up a workflow for processing pics.
Tagging photos is time consuming, but useful when you’re searching a large archive at a later date. You can apply tags either by right-clicking a thumbnail or selection of thumbnails, or by using the Filter or Captions menus on the side. Each of these has a list of current tags which you can drag and drop onto images or groups of images. Both of the Tools menus contain a link to open the more powerful Tags manager, which is great for creating and editing tags in batches.
Labels perform a similar purpose in that they make it possible to add flags to your shots to filter later. If you’re trying to whittle down a thousand images from an afternoon shoot to just a dozen, they’re invaluable.
The simplest way to add a label is to right-click an image or selection of images and in the context menu go to Assign Labels. If you’re working with a lot of images, though, mastering the shortcuts is essential.
‘Alt-3’, for example, will label an image as Accepted, while ‘Alt-1’ will label it rejected. You can then filter the thumbnail grid using the Filters menu to only show Accepted pics. Labels can be Picks, Colours or Ratings — it’s best to choose one of the three to work with and stick to that for consistency.
The final tool for selecting images is the Light Table, which enables you to do side-by-side comparisons of similar shots. Open the Light Table, then drag-and-drop the images you want to compare into the two panes that appear. Each pane has its own information menu running vertically down the side. This is particularly useful because the exposure histograms for each image is in the Colors tab, so you can see if one is blown out while the other is perfectly exposed.
Throw in a passable raw converter and image editor, and you can see why digiKam is a compelling reason for photographers to opt for a KDE desktop environment. There’s nothing quite as comprehensive as this photo management suite on any platform.