[Gllug] Recommendations for open source photo management software

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 16:37 +0000, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:

> 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....

You'd be surprised....

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

You basically need full support for EXIF and IPTC for this, and to get
the most out of available metadata you also need support for information
in the EXIF MakerNote field. A lot of applications support EXIF, but
most do it badly. It's common to see shutter speeds incorrectly
displayed due to bad conversion between the integer data in the file and
the fractional notation expected by photographers, for example.
Relatively few support MakerNote or IPTC at all.

> Full categorization - ie, not restricted to oragnizing / navigating
> based on folder hierarchy.
> 
> Printing of thumnail views of folders / categories
> 
> Easy export of folders / categories to CD/DVD or remote web photo
> publishing tools.
> 
> Support for generating arbitrarily resized images - not just thumbnails,
> but low res images for web upload, medium res for desktop background
> images, etc, etc
> 
> Does anyone have any recommendations for tools fullfilling these
> needs on Linux ?

No, but if you find one, let me know :-)

Seriously though, I've looked at a number, and I've not liked any very
much. My requirements list is more or less the same as yours, though I
also want support for Canon crw and cr2 raw image formats. I've looked
at and found some good features in:-

F-Spot - http://www.gnome.org/projects/f-spot/
DigiKam - http://www.digikam.org/
imgSeek - http://www.imgseek.net/

and a bunch of others too useless to even mention, along with a plethora
of web based apps that aren't really worth looking at, IMHO. There's
also an LWN article you might find worth reading online at
http://lwn.net/Articles/131394/ - it's not a bad overview.


My tools of choice currently remain the GNU coreutils package. There
seems to be very little in the way of photo management applications
which provide features aimed at people with more than a passing interest
in photography.

Mike

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