[Digikam-users] Some considerations concerning running digiKam on a Mac

[Wilfried Käding]

I have been using digiKam for 10 years, starting with version 0.10.0 in 2005, under GNU/Linux, and, from the beginning, found it to be the very best foto management program for my needs. (Thanks a lot to the developers for this outstanding software!)

In August 2012 I bought a 15" Macbook Pro with retina display (because of the retina display), and it was a revelation in terms of hardware quality, speed, stability and, above all, brilliancy, accuracy and sharpness of the display. Never before had I been able to admire my (and other) photographs in such perfectness (and also, had never before so clearly perceived the defects of many of them...). Since then, a normal full HD display seems just coarse to me.

But - digiKam was (and is) not available for the Mac OS X, at least not as a native build, like e. g. Gimp and RawTherapee. And iPhoto, compared with digiKam, I found to be just a nice toy. So what I did was to install Linux, more exactly: KUbuntu, on my Macbook beside Mac OS X. This worked well, with a few drawbacks like suspend mode, which never worked, and the behaviour of the trackpad and mouse, which reacted, under KUbuntu, not as fast and exact as under Mac OS X. Also, since I used the native resolution of the retina display (because I wanted to be able to see my photographs with their real resolution), text and symbols in the menu and text boxes were really tiny, so that you almost needed a magnifying glass for them. 

I put the pictures on a separate non-journaled hfs+ partition which could be read and written both by Mac OS X and KUbuntu. So far, so good. But the great disadvantage of this method was, that I needed to shutdown Mac OS X, reboot the computer and start KUbuntu, when I wanted to work with digiKam, and vice versa, when I wanted to do other work under Mac OS X. And I do need Mac OS X, above all for Sigma Photo Pro, which is the raw converter for my Sigma cameras ond only available for Windows and Mac.

When the iMac 5K appeared on the market last autumn, it was clear to me that this was just what I wanted. In February I bought it, and again, it was a revelation to me: now finally I was able to see my photographs in full size in their original resolution. The quality and brilliancy of this monitor is just overwhelming. This time I did not even try to install also Linux beside Mac OS X, but, instead, installed Arch Linux with just the KDE base packages and digiKam with all it's dependencies in a virtual machine (VirtualBox), and this works perfect. My pictures are in the pictures directory which I made accessible from inside the virtual machine. This way I can, using digiKam, directly read from and write to my photographs on the Mac partition. Running VirtualBox under Mac OS X ist fast (provided you have a fast CPU and enough main memory) and stable, and digiKam under Arch Linux works 100% reliable.

Just out of curiosity, I also tried another possibility: installing digiKam with macports directly under Mac OS X. This proved to be rather disappointing. In the first place, the GUI looks a bit quaint; some elements overlap which should not overlap, some text boxes are too high, and the import from camera does not work at all: digiKam does not recognize an attached camera automatically, and it crashes every time I click on import > [camera name]. Moreover, just installing digiKam and all it's dependencies with macports costs nearly 6 GB of mass storage, plus 5,8 GB for XCode, which you need in order to use macports. My Arch Linux installation with digiKam under VirtualBox needs 5,6 GB. This is a waste of 6 GB of mass storage for an unsatisfactory result.

So the virtual machine solution is, for me, clearly the  - no, not the best, but the second best. The best one would be to have a native build of digiKam for Mac OS X. Or even better: a combination of GNU/Linux and high quality hardware, which would work as well as the combination of Apple hardware and Mac OS X. But as far as I know, there is, at the moment, only one other 5K monitor available, and that one alone costs a lot more than the complete iMac 5K. I am no admirer of Apple, but I very much like some of their products - they are unsurpassed in terms of stableness, reliability and usability.

Wilfried Käding