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

[Arnd Baecker]

[[ and now the real reply ;-) ]]

1.)
===

For just viewing you could consider using showfoto,
which is part of the digikam package.
Another programm which is well suited for a fast display of
images is gqview.

But: even for well-sorted image collections digikam provides
features, which I find extremely useful:
- rating of images:
  Together with the new quick filters this allows to simply
  display a subset of the really good images
  (e.g. if you want to show it to someone else who only
  has time to see the best 10% ;-)
- tagging of images:
  once all images are tagged properly (well, this takes a bit of time ;-)
  this allows for finding images with specific characteristics
- adding comments

All these can be searched for very quickly and efficiently.
As digikam can be configured to write this information
into the image metadata, these could be accessed from other applications
as well.

Well, there is of course much more, like support for geo-tagging,
or the brilliant light-table to compare images side-by-side ...

((enough advertisement I hope .. ;-))

2.)
===

Gerry already explained it, see also
http://www.digikam.org/?q=node/219

This problem will be solved with digikam 0.10 which uses KDE4,
and is under heavy development, see
  http://www.digikam.org/?q=about/releaseplan

3.)
===

For this situations there are two solutions proposed in the links given in
  http://www.digikam.org/?q=node/219
(I haven't tried them myself ...)

4.)
===

kfmclient is part of konqueror.
(Can be figured out via:
    apt-file search kfmclient
if you installed the apt-file package and the corresponding
data-base  is up-to-date; this can be achieved with `apt-file update`)

So
  aptitude install konqueror
should cure the problem.

On debian etch:
  aptitude show digikam
gives
  Recommends: digikamimageplugins, kipi-plugins, kdeprint, konqueror
  Suggests: digikam-doc
Depending on the package-manager konqueror should be installed
as well; it might be that this is not done automatically,
but I don't know kubuntu well enough ....

You also might want to check whether digikamimageplugins, kipi-plugins,
kdeprint and digikam-doc are installed
(E.g. via:    dpkg -l | grep  kipi-plugins     etc.)

Hope this helps a bit, best,

Arnd