[Gllug] Recommendations for open source photo management software

[Simon Morris]

On 02/01/06, Daniel P. Berrange <dan at berrange.com> wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> I've got an ever growing archive of digitized photographs that is
> getting somewhat out of control, so I'm looking for a good software
> package to manage them. I'd like to think I've not got too many
> difficult requirements....

Hello - I saw this email yesterday when I had just started playing
with F-Spot on SUSE 10 but I've since had to curb my enthusiasm for it
a little.

It's a 0.1.2 release and very easy to crash at the moment but the
current functionality and "things that should work but don't" look
good.

> First of all, it would have to be a local desktop based tool - since
> I keep high resolution scans (60 MB each) as the master image, managing
> via the web is not really (bandwidth/speed) practical.

It's a Mono based application so if that stuff isn't included in your
distro ( Red Hat don't and won't ship Mono AFAIK ) I don't know if it
is worth installing the dependancies for it.

It is a desktop tool however and quite responsive.

> Second, rich support for associating arbitrary metadata with images,
> or groups of images (eg, location, description, lens type, film type,
> exposure, etc, etc).

F-Spot supports EXIF tags and you can view (but not edit) these tags
for images. I haven't seen the ability to view a subset of your
collection based on an EXIF tag (other than date)

>
> Full categorization - ie, not restricted to oragnizing / navigating
> based on folder hierarchy.

You can assign your own tags to images, and images can have multiple
tags associated.

>
> Printing of thumnail views of folders / categories
>
> Easy export of folders / categories to CD/DVD or remote web photo
> publishing tools.

Don't know about the printing functionality yet - it claims to be able
to export to Flickr, Web gallery, file and CD-ROM. Which sounds great
- in reality each time I tried to export it either crashed or came
back with an unspecified error message.

> Support for generating arbitrarily resized images - not just thumbnails,
> but low res images for web upload, medium res for desktop background
> images, etc, etc

F-Spot allows you to export photos at defined pixel sizes and also has
a function to crop photos into different paper sizes and a user
defined square-rectangle shape. Only problem is that whilst drawing
the square it doesn't tell you how large the shape is.

So - F-Spot is good now, if not a little (quite) unstable but should
be good in a few months if they release some fixes for it

I also like the fact that the tags you assign images are exposed to
Beagle for searching as well

HTH

--
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www: http://beerandspeech.org
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