[Digikam-users] Finally... built digikam on Mac!

[gerlos]

Hello everyone,
After almost 24 hours of (non-continous) work, I have finally Digikam 1.6.0 on my Macbook Pro 5.5! 

I used Macports to install it, and it took more time and space on disk than I expected... Sometimes it failed (dependency hell) but, as usual, searching in google is always helpful.

I'm writing this to help (I hope) people wishing to install Digikam on their Macs. Maybe I'll write a blog post on it in next weeks, after some more testing.

My primary system is Kubuntu GNU/Linux, but for work I need to keep and run Mac Os X on my laptop, so I can't always reboot to run Digikam  on my favorite desktop, KDE Plasma.

I've looked for a DAM manager similar to Digikam for Mac people, but didn't find anything that suited me, not even giving up some (at least to me) important features, like the curves tool or rating, tagging and light table. 

Started trying the software that comes with my system and my cameras, since I already payed for them: iPhoto, Canon ImageBrowser and Nikon ViewNX. iPhoto is nice, but totally lack those advanced features to manage large collections and to edit images (but face recognition is fun and useful). It's just not intended for my needs, and it's OK for me.
The software from Canon it's too basic for me, and seems it can't manage metadata in the images, and while the latter, from Nikon, can manage most of that metadata in a way similar to digikam (I can see and edit ratings, tags and captions from metadata added with digikam), it doesn't have a curves tool, that I need for my image editing workflow.

So I decided that I wanted Digikam on my Mac! 
Together with Digikam, I used Macports to install xephem, an astronomy software. 

I needed more than 12 GB of space on my HD to perform the build, and after a couple of days of work it is using 9 GB of disk. 
You know, you can stop the building process almost at any time, hitting CTRL-C on your keyboard, and resume the work later.

After installation, I could start xephem on the terminal, just typing "xephem", and it started X11 to draw the windows. 
With Digikam I was quite confused, since there weren't any digikam executable in /opt/local/bin. But things were easier: I could start it just double clicking on Digikam.app in my Applications/Macports directory, as any other mac app.
Ooops, at first it didn't start. I needed to issue these commands to make it launch smoothly:
$ sudo killall -9 dbus-daemon
$ launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist 

Maybe we need some documentation to help people.

I don't worry too much if the installed version of Digikam was somehow old. I think it's OK if macports people update it at least twice in a year. I can always build latest version on my gnu/linux systems. ;-)

I was very happy to see that it didn't need X11 to run, and tinkering for a while with Showfoto, I can say that it seems quite snappy, stable and functional, almost as in GNU/Linux. It also looks nice. Really love it. Kudos!

Now my rants:
I was afraid to see that with Digikam I got installed a lot of other things, not only from KDE. 
Why do it installed xplanet, for example? 
Actually, I really like Dolphin, Gwenview and all nice applications from KDEedu, but don't need them on this system, so I trashed most of them. But I still have 9 GB of maybe useless data on my disk, and the feel of wasted time and HD space is quite strong.

I'm sure that I shouldn't blame any Digikam developer for this, since it seems an error from the macports side, that packaged KDE and its dependencies in a maybe too monolithic way, but I think it's important to point this thing out, since it may be a really bad trap that could move away from digikam a lot of potential users.

It would be really nice indeed if we could have a self-contaned DMG file for Digikam, distributed just like any other Mac package. Doesn't matter if it's a giant package. After all, many people expects it, just look ad Aperture on the App Store: it's a 578 MB download! (side note: if Digikam were on the App Store, I'd bet that it would beat Aperture hands down!)

One thing I was missing was localization in my language (Italian). I just didn't find any port to install on macports to get it. :-(

Another thing to rant about: when I trash a file it goes to the KDE trash and not to the system trash of my mac. Ok, no problem: I can run Dolphin and empty the trash when needed, I'm a KDE fan, and I know how it works. But a Mac user would be confused indeed.

Themes doesn't work, at least not as expected: when I change theme only some colors in windows change, but most of them remain unchanged.

All in all, we are *almost* there... Digikam seems to run mostly fine on Mac Os X, and it's already a very good new!

Hope this mail wasn't too boring for you, and hope it will help future users.

regards
gerlos


--
"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more
of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something
else. The trick is the doing something else."
           < http://gerlos.altervista.org >
 gerlos  +- - - >  gnu/linux registred user #311588