3 Software to manage your photo on Linux

Dec 092011

In this article I’ll do a roundup over a collection of software that can be very useful for all people who have the hobby of photography.
They can be really useful if you have a collection of photo and you want to organize them in albums, by date or tags.

Most of them have also the option to upload your photo on online website like Picasa, Flickr or Facebook.

So, let’s take a look at digiKam, Shotwell and gThumb.

digiKam

digiKam is an advanced digital photo management application for Linux, Windows, and Mac-OSX.
It runs on most known desktop environments and window managers if the required libraries are installed. It supports all major image file formats, and can organize collections of photographs in directory-based albums, or dynamic albums by date, timeline, or by tags. Users can also add captions and ratings to their images, search through them and save searches for later use. With the plugins they can also export albums to 23hq, Facebook, Flickr, Gallery2, Google Earth’s KML files, SmugMug, Piwigo, Simpleviewer, burn them on CD, or create web galleries.

Features

With DigiKam you can :
Import pictures

Over 1200 digital camera devices supported
Serial connection
USB connection
USB/IEEE Mass storage connection
Connecting autodetection of camera using HAL/KDE service

Organization of Photos in Albums and sub-Albums

Comments can be added to Albums
Tags can be added to Albums

View items

Support for RAW pictures using LibRaw included in libKdcraw
Support of more 300 proprietary RAW camera file formats.
Complete camera list is given here

Edit and enhance Fast image editor with keyboard shortcuts and basic photo editing/management features
without losing metadata.
Create (slideshows, calendar, print, …)
Share your creations

Export to HTML
Send pictures by email
Export to 23, Flickr, Flash, PicasaWeb, SmugMug, Piwigo and Zooomr
Import From/Export to FaceBook and Shwup
Export to Gallery powered websites
Export to KML
Export to a local directory or remote computer using KIO protocols (ftp, ssh, smb, fish, svn, tar …)

Web Site: www.digikam.org
Screenshots: www.digikam.org/drupal/node/323
Documentation: www.digikam.org/drupal/docs

Shotwell

Shotwell is an image organizer designed to provide personal photo management for the GNOME desktop environment. It has replaced F-Spot as the standard image tool for several GNOME-based Linux distributions, including Fedora in version 13 and Ubuntu in its 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release. And at the moment it’s my favorite tool in this category.

Features

Import: Import photos from folders or from any digital camera supported by gPhoto.
organize: Shotwell automatically groups photos taken at the same time. You can also use tags and ratings to organize your photo collection.
Edit : You can rotate, crop, reduce red-eye, and adjust the exposure, saturation, tint, and temperature of each photo.
Publish : Publish photos and videos to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and YouTube.

Web Site: http://yorba.org/shotwell/
Documentation: http://yorba.org/shotwell/help

gThumb

gThumb is an open-source image viewer and organizer for the GNOME desktop environment released under the GNU General Public License. It was originally based on GQView, and is designed to have a clean, simple interface. It also includes an importer tool for transferring photos from cameras. gThumb has a plug-in system for extensions. Some standard features are implemented as extensions and are supplied with the standard distribution. Users may write (and share) additional extensions.

Features

Image Viewer

View single images (including GIF animations). Supported image types are: BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, ICO, XPM.
View EXIF data attached to JPEG images.
View in fullscreen mode, rotated, flipped, in black and white.

Image Browser

Browse your hard disk showing you thumbnails of image files.
Thumbnails are saved in the same database used by Nautilus so you don’t waste disk space.
Automatically update the content of a folder.
Copy, move, delete images and folders.
Bookmarks of folders and catalogs.

Image Organizer

Add comments to images.
Organize images in catalogs, catalogs in libraries.
Print images and comments.
Search for images on your hard disk and save the result as a catalog. Search criteria remain attached to the catalog so you can update it when you want.

Image Editor