Lee Marzke on 30 Jul 2010 07:41:55 -0700


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Re: [PLUG] Picasa replacement?



I'm a long time amateur / low end professional photographer, and had read books about Digital Asset Management (DAM) software, but thought that was only available on Windows. I then found this article about Digikam and DAM:

http://www.gerhard.fr/DAM/

So I recently went from no system ( other than Gimp ) to using Digikam + DAM

I have to say, DAM makes a lot of sense, so that is why I'm moving my archives ( mostly just on the file system ) to Digikam. Photos are rated with 0 to 5 stars, and for me with only a few thousand photos there should be mostly 0 to 3 stars with maybe a couple 4 stars. I also create profiles with copyright info, etc. and push this template out to all the images, so most important info , other than organization
into albums,  are located in the images themselves.

I still edit with Gimp, and haven't used the buit-in editor, but it looks reasonable. Needless to say that original images ( JPG or RAW ) are never touched, and only copies are edited, so you have to come up with an naming convention for adjustments or crops. I only have one camera ( Nikon D40 ) so all my image are numbered by the camera - but with a 2nd body this would have to change.

I never noticed that Digikam is KDE, and I use Gnome, so it must not make much difference.

Digikam publishes easily to many formats, and I run a Gallery2 site for display. I've been quite happy with Gallery2 as well, and moves are quite easy with data in PostgreSQL.

I've started a gallery of my better shots [1] ( I'm just starting this, so it's rather small )

My photos of the recent Nikola Tesla Energy Ind Celebration in Philly.  [2]

My images are on a remote NAS, Gallery is on a VM, and Digikam is on my laptop, so I really need to figure
out the Digikam backup,  as nightly duplicity backups may not be enough ?


[1] http://gallery.marzke.net/main.php?g2_itemId=11564

[2] http://gallery.marzke.net/main.php?g2_itemId=11573

Lee

On 07/29/2010 05:48 PM, JP Vossen wrote:
Like much of Google, I have a love/hate relationship with Picasa. It looks and works great, but it's a nightmare to administer, like when changing hardware/OS/username as I did for my wife recently. She was running v3.0 beta on Hardy 32-bit and is now running the same v.3.0 beta on Lucid 64-bit on a new machine, with a different user name.

Picasa for "Linux" is really just Picasa for Windows with just enough wine wrapped around it to work, which is annoying. I wonder if Google will really ban Windows like they said [1], and if so what that'll mean for native Linux apps. But anyway...


Any recommendations on a Picasa replacement? It must be in the Lucid repos or have a PPA or third-party Lucid repo. (So running the regular Windows Picasa under regular Wine doesn't count.)


We are pretty low-end users with only a few thousand pics but they are hosted on the file server, not the local drive and I want them to stay that way. She wants a fast viewer, albums (not related to physical directory), basic tweaking features (e.g., red-eye, "I'm feeling lucky," etc.), and uploads to Snapfish, Facebook, etc. I'd like something that works well when the picture files are on the file server (bonus points for working well over slow links though I won't hold my breath), and isn't too hard to migrate out of if needed (both things Picasa is particularly bad at).


Digikam looks pretty good, but it is a KDE app and I run Gnome. It's the best of the lot I'm aware of, and I may give it a try if no one has anything better... Like Picasa, it wants to keep its own DB (sqlite) on the *local* drive (network drives not allowed), but unlike Picasa you can configure where, and it'll also "export" meta data into the picture file, which is actually pretty cool.

I've looked at F-Spot, but it seems primitive, and I've seen reports of it wanting to move things around on disk and so forth.

Shotwell [2] looks promising, but the one in the Lucid repos is even more primitive than F-Spot.

## Haven't really looked at these yet
ansel1 - Horde photo management application
flphoto - Image manager with great printing functionality

## These are interesting, but don't actually address the specific need/problem, they are additional tools.
fotowall - simple application for creating collages and compositions
fotoxx - easy-to-use digital photo editor


Thanks,
JP

[1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d2f3f04e-6ccf-11df-91c8-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=9a36c1aa-3016-11da-ba9f-00000e2511c8,print=yes.html [2] http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/06/14/0055221/Ubuntu-Replaces-F-Spot-With-Shotwell
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
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"Microsoft Tax" = the additional hardware & yearly fees for the add-on
software required to protect Windows from its own poorly designed and
implemented self, while the overhead incidentally flattens Moore's Law.
___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug


--
"Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion..."  - Kryptos

Lee Marzke,  lee@marzke.net   http://marzke.net/lee/
IT Consultant, VMware, VCenter, SAN storage, infrastructure, SW CM
+1 484-961-0369  voice         +1 484-348-2230 fax


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___________________________________________________________________________
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