Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
ImageManagementandEditing
digiKam
(Ubuntu repositories)
There are many image management and editing applications available for
Linux, but we think digiKam (Figure 6-74) is the best choice. We use it primarily
to index, annotate, manipulate, and edit our collection of thousands of digital
camera images, but it's also useful to manage and edit other images in nearly
any format. (For example, we used it to manage the TIFF screen captures used
in this chapter.)
Figure 6-74.
digiKam splash screen
Ubuntu doesn't install digiKam by default. To install digiKam, click the Ubuntu
Applications menu and choose Add/Remove. When the Add/Remove Appli-
cations dialog appears, type “digiKam” in the search box. Mark the digiKam
checkbox in the packages list and click Apply Changes.
When you fire up digiKam for the first time, the splash screen shown in Figure
6-74 appears, and persists until the program has finished scanning your hard
drives. In our case, that took more than an hour, with the hard drives banging
away the whole time. Of course, if you don't have 12 TB of disk space and tens
of thousands of image files, your wait will be shorter.
Once indexing completes, you can use digiKam to organize your images into
albums, attach captions, tags, and ratings to each image, and so on. Figure
6-75 shows the main screen of digiKam as we began to attach captions and
tags to some recently shot images.
