[Scottish] Software for digital camera output

[John Gordon Ollason]

I am thinking of buying a digital camera. I have had a look around the  
various specs and everything seems to come with its own Mac/PC software. I  
have found it perfectly
straightforward to plug my wife's Olympus camera into the USB port of my  
Iyonix---Gotta have it to use Techwriter...---and the camera shows up like  
a new SCSI disk, and I can ftp jpegs from the Iyonix to my linux box and  
play to my heart's content with Gimp, though the highest quality jpegs  
need to be crunched down in Electric Eye before they are small enough. The  
quality is not an issue, because I am primarily interested in illustrating  
a website.

I notice that some cameras are supplied with software including a USB  
driver. Does this mean that I was just lucky with the Olympus? Or do  
supplied drivers do something fancier than just make the camera look like  
a SCSI disk?

I have downloaded digikam but have not yet installed it. Usual issues of  
not being a heat-seeker, and so lots of other stuff to install first. Has  
anybody had experience using it? Is it worth the bother?

Thanks for any information

John O.