[Digikam-users] Digikam capabilities

[Willem Ferguson]

Dear Digicam user group,

I Use Digikam 1.4 on Ubuntu 10.04. As a previous user of Picasa, I am 
very impressed with Digikam and the flexibility that it provides for 
managing a collection of photos within an open source environment. 
Several things of Picassa irks me, especially the closed "black box' 
approach of Google and their refusal to write true open source software, 
limiting the use of Picassa to Wine. Linux Picassa cannot do video or 
sound files. On the other hand, it looks like many goods things are 
developed in the world of KDE, even though I do not use KDE myself. 
Digikam offers all the facilities, the lack of which irks me in Picassa. 
I really look forward to Digikam V2.0. Two things about Digikam puzzles 
me and probably reflects my ignorance about the software. Maybe these 
issues have been addressed in verrsions after 1.4 but I cannot find the 
appropriate documentation. I have looked in the FAQ and other references 
(e.g. the manual) and have not found a solution.

1) A facility in Picassa that I use almost every time I work with 
photos, is to rearrange photos within a folder. In Picassa this can be 
achieved by dragging and dropping the photos on the desktop, allowing 
one to group similar photos together, all within the same particular 
folder. I have tested Digikam extensively and the only way in which I 
could achieve this is by renaming the photos so that the alphabetical 
sorting of the OS will cause them to be adjacent within the same folder 
on the Digikam desktop. Alternatively they could be grouped together by 
creating a subfolder and placing similar photos in separate subfolders 
within their original folder. The disadvantage here is that this gives 
rise to a very complex folder structure. It would be really useful if 
the photos could be rearranged by dragging and dropping in a similar way 
to Picassa.

2) Sharpening of images. My view of sharpening is similar to that of 
digital zoom: if the fundamental resolution is not in the image, no 
amount of postprocessing can create sharpness. However, I have to admit 
that I do frequently use sharpening in Picassa before using the shots in 
a website environment. Picassa does the 'sharpening' instantaneously. (I 
suspect the actual algorithm is an analogue of the Sharpening option in 
Digikam. Digikam offers several approaches to 'sharpening'). In digikam, 
sharpening takes more than a minute for a 8 mpixel photo. The difference 
in speed of sharpening between Digikam and Picassa in really marked for 
the same photo. Is there any way of speeding up the sharpening process?

My perception is that Digikam could replace Picassa hands down. The 
handling of metadata as well as batch and scripting options alone are 
sufficient to put Digikam in a different class to Picassa. Digikam also 
has means to create similar or better alternatives to PicassaWeb. Thank 
you for your work to produce a top-flight application. I agree: manage 
your shots PROFESSIONALLY with the power of Open source (not 'like a 
professional').

Kind regards,
Willem Ferguson.