Most of us shoot photographs and store them on a hard drive of some kind, whether that’s just our smartphone snaps or more sophisticated RAW fi les from a DSLR camera. Since it doesn’t take long for the amount of photos to get out of hand, most of us need a way to store, sort and organise them. In the world of Linux photo managers, digiKam is the most advanced and solid application for this job. This splendid and heavyweight open-source application shows very robust development speed, delivering good news every few months. The 4.x series is constantly updated with maintenance releases, bringing scrupulous bug fi xes as well as better multi-monitor support, improved geotagging, face recognition, colour management, extra key strokes and lots of many minor goodies. In digiKam, photos can be organised into albums, which can be sorted chronologically, by directory layout or by custom collections. Each photo can be assigned with one or many tags, so you can view and browse tagged images all at once, despite the photos being spread out across multiple directories. Besides tags, custom comments and star ratings can be added to each photo and altered in future. All this is stored in a robust and reliable SQLite database. digiKam makes use of KIPI (KDE Image Plugin Interface) plug-ins for lots of added functionality and shares some image effect plug-ins with other KDE-related applications, such as Gwenview and Krita. There are tons of features in digiKam and the most prominent ones are its gorgeous photo-importing dialog; its automatic facial recognition and sorting; its powerful editor for playing with colours and exposure; batch queue manager; and light table for comparing similar shots. digiKam also features Marble integration for showing maps and a very useful fuzzy search tool for coping with ‘nearly identical’ shots. digiKam is included with almost any distro, so the only question left is where to get the latest release. Users of Ubuntu and Mint can get it from dedicated ppa (ppa:philip5/ extra), while Arch/Manjaro users can always turn to AUR.
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