[KPhotoAlbum] what photo tools do you guys use?

[Shawn Willden]

On Friday 18 May 2007 12:33:42 pm Sujee Maniyam wrote:
> So what other software you have found useful.  Can you share them here?

Glad to.  Here's a list of tools I use:

gphoto2
exiftool
shell scripts
Bibblepro
KPhotoAlbum
GIMP
Gallery2
rsync
Hugin
dvd-slideshow
iMovie on OS X

And here's my workflow:

I have a small script that uses gphoto2 to download images and delete them 
from the cameras.  This script is automatically executed by udev, so all I 
have to do is plug the camera in and it downloads everything into 
my "Pictures/new" directory.

Next, since I shoot everything in RAW mode, I need to convert the pictures to 
JPEGs.  I use a commercial tool called Bibblepro [1].  Bibblepro isn't cheap 
($150), but it gives me great control over the conversion process and really 
makes my pictures look a lot better.  I also winnow out the lousy shots at 
this point.  Oh, Bibblepro runs natively on Linux as well as OS X and 
Windows.

I often take my GPS with me when I'm shooting, and then I use gpsbabel to 
download the GPS track and gpscorrelate to put GPS coordinates in the EXIF 
headers of the JPEGs.

I have another homegrown script that renames the image files and moves them 
into the image archive, organized by date (<year>/<month>/<day>).  The reason 
it renames them is I have three different cameras, all Canons, and every now 
and then I get name collisions.  The script uses exiftool to extract a 
five-digit sequence number along with the camera model and date.  It 
concatenates these values to construct the new file name.  The script also 
puts the JPEGs in one directory tree and the RAW files in another.

I use KPA for reviewing, tagging, displaying, finding, etc., etc., etc.  I 
also use the Gallery plugin for uploading to my on-line Gallery2 gallery [2].

When I need to edit photos, I use the GIMP, generally invoking it from KPA.  
Most of what I used to do in the gimp (color and contrast adjustments, 
sharpening, cropping, etc.) I now do in Bibblepro, but I still use the GIMP 
to do more serious image surgery, such as cloning out unwanted elements, 
smoothing skin, adding artistic effects, etc.

For assembling multi-image panoramas, I use Hugin, sometimes using the GIMP to 
touch up the blending and to make the final color, contrast and sharpness 
adjustments.

For backup, I use rsync (from a shell script) to sync all of the images and 
supporting files to my file server.  When my laptop drive gets full, I delete 
my local copy of the RAW images (the ability to do that is much of the reason 
I put them in a separate directory tree).  I also rsync copies of all of the 
JPEGs to my wife's iBook, and periodically burn DVDs of them to store at my 
mother's house (offsite backup!).

For building slideshows, I have used dvd-slideshow, and it works well, but 
more often I use iMovie on my wife's iBook.

For printing, I use KPA to select and tag with tokens the pictures I want to 
print, then I drag and drop them into a folder.  If I'm printing family 
snapshots, I use a pygimp script I wrote to place a nicely-formatted date and 
timestamp in the lower right-hand corner of the image.  For printing pictures 
I intend to frame I skip the date marking.  When I've got them all ready to 
go, I send them to adoramapix.com for printing.

Oh, and with the exception of iMovie, all of this runs on Debian unstable.

I think that covers it :-)

	Shawn.