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

[Arnd Baecker]

and now to the speed issue:

On Tue, 29 Jan 2008, Yuval Levy wrote:

> Gerhard Kulzer wrote:
> >> digiKam was significantly slower than gqview. Unfortunately too slow for
> >> me. So my question is: why is it so slow (after all, most tools use
> >> dcraw for RAW decoding)? and: can I do something to help change that?
> >
> > I can only second what Gilles has already said: compare the same things!
> >
> > digiKam can't be slow in RAW decoding because if you compare it to dcraw it
> > matches. In other words, it can't be faster than dcraw. If other applications
> > are, they use degraded modes of dcraw like half resolution and 8 bit
> > decoding, linear interpolation.

Acutually, I just checked and the image dimension
you get are (slightly) different for gqview compared to showfoto,
because showfoto uses the "real" RAW and not the embedded image.

[...]

> Probably Canon's DPP, Adobe's Lightroom, Apple's Aperture and other
> professional tools use two different algorythms, one for the thumbnails
> and for browsing; the other for exporting images from the RAW files. I
> don't really care how they do it - the browsing is faster and this is
> what counts to me.
>
> human time is expensive. A tool that makes me wait for a higher quality
> conversion than what I need is *worse* IMO than a tool that adapts its
> quality to my needs and saves my time.

I think that what you would like to have is implemented in digikam
but not (yet) in showfoto:

Under "Configure/Albums - Interface Options"
you have: "Thumbnail click action: - Show embedded preview"
and below [x] Embedded preview load full image size.
If you de-activate the last one, displaying RAWs
is much faster.

Also note that there is one open bug about preloading raw images
  http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=132047
  "Faster display of images and/or prefetch wished for"
And a related one:
  http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146260
  "first load reduced image and then full image"

So when you look through the comments for these two wishes,
there has been quite a bit of discussion and code concerning
the speed of display ... ;-)

Best, Arnd