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

[Gerry Patterson]

On Jan 19, 2008 8:35 PM, Yuval Levy <digikam08 at sfina.com> wrote:

> 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
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Hi Yuv,

We meet again. :-)

The original reason as to why it isn't recommended to use a remote file
server for pictures with digikam was a limitation of the sqlite database
backend of digikam. Something to do with the locking inadequacies of NFS.
There were some work arounds but I am not sure if they have been completely
resolved yet.  Someone else on this list would be better able to answer this
question.  There are some excellent people and some very good developers are
working on digikam.

As for the problems you have starting up, are you using kubuntu or ubuntu?
Or perhaps a better question would be: are you using the K Desktop
Environment?  If not you, may not have all of the dependencies installed.  I
would think the packager would have resolved this, but perhaps not.  You
could try to apt-get install 'kubuntu-desktop' and startup in KDE just to
see if you have the same problems.

Over half a terabyte of RAW images?!  Wow.

Best Regards,

- Gerry
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