Photography Digikam masterclass......
There’s nothing quite like Digikam for all-round photo mastery. Adam Oxford gets you started with this comprehensive tool.
Adam Oxford explains how this program can help you master your photography.
Gnome’s default photography tools are a disaster. The ageing Shotwell is okay, 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 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 setup 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-byrow 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