[Digikam-users] New User: is digiKam right for me? and if not, what alternative?

[Yuval Levy]

Hi all,

I've just installed digiKam on ubuntu 7.10 for a test drive.
  $ sudo apt-get install digikam

I am PC-proficient, though my experience with Linux is limited. I run a 
few FreeBSD servers, and on the desktop I am still mostly using Windows, 
although I have been dual booting with ubuntu for about a year, I can 
find my way around, and I intend to switch away from Windows one day.

Photography-wise, I have an archive of approximately 600GB. I shoot 
almost exclusively RAW. The files are well sorted. All I need is an 
application to quickly browse through my existing folders, display the 
RAWs efficiently, and pass them to another application for conversion / 
editing / whatever.

First thing that digiKam asks me on startup is an Album Library Folder 
which from reading the documentation on the website I understand is the 
folder where the images are stored. In BOLD the window asking for the 
folder says "do not use a mount path hosted by a remote computer".

Why?

I store my images on a RAID on a file server. My internal network is 
Giga-Ethernet. I open the files directly there, online, from 
Photoshop/Windows, with no noticeable speed penalty. I don't want to 
store images locally since I use many computers to access them and I do 
not want to invest in each client the same amount of redundancy and 
backup that I have in the server.

If this is not an option with digiKam, what other RAW-browsing tool 
would you recommend?

Furthermore, I noticed a few details on startup.

When I click on the "help" button it says "could not launch KDE Help 
Center". How do I install help? and why does help not install with the 
package itself?

I accept the default path for the Album Library Folder just to check out 
the application and digiKam starts with a beautiful page. It seems to be 
  a page with hyperlinks (underline blue) and I have a web browser 
(Firefox) installed. Instead it gives me an error message saying "Could 
not launch the browser: Could not find service kfmclient". Why?

Thanks in advance for your help
Yuv