Ease of use

Getting help when you need it.

Ease of use often implies the user interface – but by necessity, this becomes more complicated as more features are added. Because it seems unfair to penalise the more fully featured offerings for this, and because the ease by which you can manage your photo collection depends to a large extent on features discussed elsewhere, our emphasis here is on the documentation and support provided to help you get up to speed and resolve any issues. These aspects differ significantly between the packages.

Digikam has a very extensive user manual, which can be viewed online or downloaded as a PDF. It can almost be thought of as a tutorial, as opposed to just providing hard facts on software features. It is a community-supported project, enabling questions to be asked via a mailing list.

User documentation for gthumb takes the form of an online manual. This is fairly minimal; indeed there are some features that aren’t covered at all. There’s a mailing list through which you can elicit support from other users.

Picty comes with basic documentation but several links to sub-sections don’t work; indeed the authors admit that the documentation is “very incomplete”. Support is provided through a Google group.

There’s an online manual for Shotwell and, while it appears to be complete, it only provides basic information. There’s a mailing list and a decided user group on the Flickr photo-sharing site.

Finally and most disappointingly, Xnview MP has no user documentation at all. Instead, your only officially sanctioned option for learning about it is a user forum.