Plugins and add-ons

What more can they do?

Who doesn’t like more bang for their buck? While these managers pack in a lot of features, some can take on more work thanks to optional plugins. The two managers that make the most of plugins are DigiKam and KPhotoAlbum. Both can be extended with plugins from the KIPI (KDE Image Plugins Interface) framework. The KIPI package ships with 40 plugins that add all kinds of abilities to the app, eg you can export images to flash, stitch them into a panorama, blend bracketed images and stream them to a DLNA device etc.

When you are done sorting and touching up your images, you can even publish them on the web or post them to friends straight from within the application. Thanks to the KIPI plugins, both DigiKam and KPhotoAlbum can export images to PicasaWeb, Flickr, Facebook, SmugMug and other websites. Similarly, Shotwell, which uses its own plugins framework, can publish images to various popular websites and social networks. Shotwell ships with its plugins and many of these power features of the application, such as the F-Spot data importer, various slideshow transitions etc.

Unlike the other applications, Fotoxx only uses its plugin framework to switch the editing duties to an external tool, such as Gimp or ImageMagick. XnViewMP too is different to the other applications in that it ships with just four plugins that allow it to read WebP, OpenEXR and other exotic formats.