Organisation
Are they effective sifters?
Since the primary purpose of a good photo manager is to manage images, each application in the Roundup should offer plenty of ways to visualise your album.
DigiKam enables you to organise collections of photographs into directory-based albums. It can also filter images based on tags and other metadata. You can describe and organise images by specifying a title along with a caption as well as other information, such as a details about its rights and location etc. You can also use the application to tag faces and sort the images by assigning labels (Accepted, Rejected, Pending), colours and ratings. You can search the images based on various criteria and then save the searches for later perusal. One helpful feature is that, on initial launch, you can ask DigiKam to store the metadata information that has been assigned to the images in order to improve the application’s interoperability with other photo managers.
XnViewMP also boasts a wide variety of tagging features. You can add a rating and colour label to identify images based on their quality (Excellent, Average etc) or purpose (Work, Home, etc). You can categorise images in several predefined categories, such as photographs, drawings, videos etc and the application can sort images by all sorts of metadata (orientation, rating and print size etc).
Then there’s Shotwell which automatically groups photos and videos by date and tags while importing them. It too has support for tags and ratings and enables you to flag images, add a title and a description to an image. Like DigiKam, Shotwell also allows a user to organise images with a search feature that offers quite complex search options and enables you to save the search criteria for quick retrieval later.
Fotoxx also allows you to add metadata, dates, ratings, captions, comments and more to images that it manages. The application has predefined tag categories to help you easily tag images. Like the others, the Fotoxx enables you to search images using any metadata as well as folder and file names.
Tags and other metadata are known as annotations in KPhotoAlbum and these can be easily managed from the annotations window. You can add a label, date, time, rating and description to the images as well as add tags for people and places. As you move through the library tagging images, you can save time by copying tags from previously tagged images.