digiKam is an open source project that provides users with a dedicated photo management solution, specifically designed to be deployed on KDE desktop environments. It includes image editor and organizer components, which can be easily extended through a built-in and powerful plugin architecture.
Features at a glance
Key features include red eyes correction, brightness, contrast, gamma, hue, saturation and luminosity correction, color balance, color inversion, color auto-correction, ratio cropping, free cropping, black & white and tonality converter using curves adjustments, rotation, and flipping.
With this tool, you will be able to import pictures, organize your photo collection, view images, edit and enhance photos, create slideshows and calendars, print and share your photo creations using social web services, email images, and much more.
Getting started with digiKam
When running the application for the first time, users will be asked to enter the path of the database where the image files will be stored, set how they want to manipulate RAW images, as well as if they want to add information to image files, and how photos will be displayed in preview mode.
In addition, the first time wizard will ask you to set how images should be opened when right clicked, as well as to enable or disable contextual tooltips in folder-view and icon-view modes. After this, the application will open and will prompt users with a “Tip of the Day” dialog, from where they can learn how to use certain functions of the application.
The user interface is comprised of the main image view area and a sidebar that acts as an image navigator, tag browser, calendar browser, timeline viewer, image finder, duplicate finder, geographical locator, and people tagger.
Bottom line
Summing up, digiKam is a very complex photo management application for Linux-based operating systems. Too bad that it requires the KDE runtime libraries to work on other open source desktop environments.
