digiKam approaches 1.0

“With film cameras, there was an incremental cost for each shot
taken and each print made, which tended to reduce—but not
eliminate—the problem of organizing a photo collection. With
digital photos, though, there are programs like digiKam that can
assist in this task. As digiKam approaches its 1.0 release it seems
like a good time to see what it can do.

“When first starting digiKam (1.0-beta5 from Fedora Rawhide),
one is faced with the “First Run Assistant” that allows the user to
make some choices on settings for the program. Earlier versions
(0.10.0 on Fedora 10) seem to want to index the entire disk or
something—perhaps from an errant setting—when they
start, leading the user to believe that digiKam has crashed or
exited, so the assistant is a much better welcome. Unfortunately,
it asks too many questions and, more importantly, several that a
new user is unlikely to have a good answer for. Taking the defaults
is a reasonable option, but also seems unnecessary; asking for a
storage directory and pointing users at the configuration menu item
would seem enough to get started.

“The program itself has two main sections, the left hand side
has photo albums, searches, calendar view, map search view, etc.
based on which tool is selected, and the right hand side shows the
results of the operation. The results show thumbnails of the images
with information on tags, ratings, and creation date. Hovering over
an image or thumbnail brings up a box with much more information
including EXIF data from the file, image dimensions, and
filename.”

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