[digiKam-users] digiKam - What is a digital photo manager?

[Remco Viëtor]

On jeudi 21 juillet 2022 09:04:51 CEST Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jul 2022 at 15:00, jdd at dodin.org <jdd at dodin.org> wrote:
> > Le 21/07/2022 à 03:50, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming a écrit :
> > > Subject: digiKam - What is a digital photo manager?
> > > 
> > > Good day from Singapore,
> > > 
> > > I have never used a digital photo manager before. I simply keep and
> > > organize my photos in folders on file systems in Linux or Windows.
> > > 
> > > What does a digital photo manager do?
> > 
> > mostly used by me as indexing system: adding tags to find my photos
> > easily by subject
> 
> Lol I have never added tags to my photos before. Maybe I should give
> digital photo manager a try.
Image management becomes important when your collection gets larger. (I'm at 
30 000 images and counting). Tagging is especially useful if you want to find 
images according to different criteria. 

Example: I do a lot of nature photography on different sites. So I want to be 
able to find images based on date, site, and species. That's not possible with 
just one directory tree, so images are stored by date, and have hierarchical 
tags indicating location (country-region-town-detail) and species (order-
family-...). So it's easy to find all images of songbirds at a given location.

In addition, ratings are useful to easily find the best images (images that 
are not among the best can still be interesting because they show particular 
situations, or they are just the only ones I have of a species or a site).
Of course, titles and captions are useful to record extra information about an 
image (or just have it more easily accessible). It's possible to search that 
info as well, just less useful (free text, where I keep tags with a limited 
vocabulary)

> > Digikam have also a not so bad image editor that allow most usual work
> > on photos
> 
> How is Digikam compared to GIMP?

GIMP has more options for image editing (e.g. layers), not only photo editing, 
but needs plugins or external programs for the initial development of a raw 
file (which is not an image file, one of the more important steps needed is 
demosaicing). Otoh, Digikam is more oriented towards raw editing. But I don't 
use digikam for editing, I find it a bit too limited (darktable suits me 
better for editing, but less for tagging etc.).

And afaik, GIMP isn't able to deal with an image collection, so you can't use 
it to find images. 

Remco