[Digikam-users] Review of Digikam

[Gonçalo Valverde]

Hi Caulier.

I understand that digiKam is an Open Source effort and that it's not a
commercial application. Please don't take this as a personal
criticism, and like i said digiKam provides a lot of interesting
functionality. But being an Open Source effort doesn't mean that user
experience should be something less important than functionality, and
if I understood correctly the main drivers of the Appeal project, the
user experience is on the core of KDE4.

I'm for the Free Software movement (and I also help to promote it),
but one thing that we must never forget is that if we want to make
people use the software it must be appealing (pun not intended :) ) to
them. This is not made as a criticism to the developers which did a
great job at the program, just the feedback of a long time Open Source
software user (I've been using Linux for at least 13 years). KDE (and
GNOME) was a major step into wide acceptance of Linux and Open Source
into the destkop because it improved the user experience. digiKam
which is already a great application could have a bigger acceptance if
the workflow is easier and more intuitive to use. I know that I'm
spoiled for having tried Adobe Lightroom and Picasa, but to be honest
it was due to the easiness of their user interface that i've started
to do some photo processing.. I've always stayed as far as I could of
it using GIMP or Photoshop because it was not worth the time spent on
it. And I've only started using digiKam after using Lightroom and
Picasa because I wanted to do the same thing in Linux. I've tried
f-spot first, which has some nice ideas about the user interface but
like i said before it lacks a lot in terms of functionality.

Best regards