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

[Arnd Baecker]

[[This is my 10th attempt to reply to this mail, but all my
previous tries were considered as spam. So this time I will
split it into two parts]]

Hi Yuv,

great to see you here - hope we can convince you to stay ;-)

On Sat, 19 Jan 2008, Yuval Levy 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.

[reply in 1.) in the next mail ]

> 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?

[reply in 2.) in the next mail ]

> 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.

[reply in 3.) in the next mail ]

> 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?

[reply in 4.) in the next mail ]

Sorry for this unusual reply, surely not a practice
to be followed if not necessary .... ;-),

Best, Arnd