Digikam: An iPhoto Replacement for Linux

When looking at photo management applications, iPhoto, the photo management application by Apple, has fast become a standard (or at least a standard template) for other programs. Linux has three applications that follow iPhoto's general look and feel - F-Spot (for the Gnome desktop), Picasa (from Google), and Digikam (for the KDE desktop). This review will go over one of the newest of these programs - Digikam, which describes itself as Photo Management For The Masses.

Digikam truly is a Swiss Army knife of photo management. Using two other open-source projects (dcraw for downloading photos off digital cameras and gphoto2 for accessing digital cameras), Digikam supports more than 200 proprietary camera file formats and more than 700 different cameras. As well, Digikam supports cameras using USB, Firewire and serial connections.

Unlike F-Spot, which only gives the user a few ways of viewing photos (which could have to do with F-Spot's comparatively shorter development time), Digikam allows the user to arrange photos by albums, date imported, tagging (similar to what F-Spot uses), and - like "smart" searches or folders in Mac OS X, Digikam can also give the user a constantly changing library based on a saved search.

Perhaps the best thing Digikam has going for it is a companion library titled DigikamImagePlugins. While Digikam has - on its own - a fairly standard set of image manipulation features, such as crop, zoom, rotate and color adjustments, DigikamImagePlugins adds much more. Included in this plugin (which should be available for all users to download from their Linux distribution), are filters and effects one might associate with Photoshop or GIMP, such as distortion effects, oil pain and level adjustment.

In addition, great tools like refocus, pixel correction, perspective and text tools are available through DigikamImagePlugins. One note for those who might read this review after a few months have gone by - it was recently announced (at the end of March, 2007), that for the next release of Digikam, which will be version 0.9.2, DigikamImagePlugins will disappear, and will be included by default into the standard Digikam package.

As well as standard outputs, such as exporting to a webpage, html gallery, Photo CD and a variety of formats, Digikam also allows for a logical, but not-often-used output, which is a calendar. Simply choose a few great photos, and Digikam will automatically format them into a calendar, which can be printed or saved as a pdf file for distribution or later printing (or taking it to a professional print shop for very high quality printing).

In addition to tagging photos for viewing and organizing, another unique feature Digikam has is the ability to add comments to a particular image. These comments are stored in a SQLite database, so if exporting photos to a new library, this information could be lost. But with proper care, all comments, tags and meta information can be retained.

One nice thing for those who like to tweak programs is the ability Digikam has to use themes (either built-in themes or those submitted or developed by users. This allows a user to select a color theme appropriate for the computer's color theme, as well as to make viewing large numbers of photographs easier on the eyes.

Overall, Digikam is an excellent program. It is written for the KDE environment, but - like most Linux programs - can be used in any environment with few adverse effects. In fact, the only things I've noticed when running Digikam in Gnome is that, if Digikam is the first KDE program to be run after starting up the computer, it will take quite a while to start, as the computer needs to load the KDE libraries, which can be quite large. But after that, Digikam will run quite fast.

I would highly recommend Digikam to users looking both for a simple photo management program, as well as those looking for something with a few more features.