Digikam

Other languages:

View, manage, edit, enhance, organize, tag, and share photographs.

DigiKam supports import of photos from cameras, creation of albums, tagging with dates, subjects and other properties, and excellent search facilities. Please consult the manual for full details, including picture formats supported.

Features

Managing your Photos

Digikam provides advanced functionality to manage your photos. You can view your photos in chronological order, or classify the photos in different albums, there is also the possibility to organize your photos with the localization they were taken.

Create Album
Timeline View
Map View

Moreover, Digikam also provide multiple search features, you can do a simple keyword search, but also advanced search on the metadata and even some fuzzy search, where you draw a pattern and Digikam try to find matching photos. Digikam can also found duplicate in your library.

Simple Search View
Detailed Search
Fuzzy Search
Identify duplicates

Digikam can also display the Exif information of your photo.

The Image Editor

Edit metadata
Assigning a Rating
Adjust Colour Levels
White Balance Adjustment
Convert to Black and White
Red-eye correction
Auto Colour Correction
Lens Auto Correction
Find Edges effect
Washout effect

The Camera Interface

Read from Removable Media
or from Camera
Save direct to Albums
Add Geolocation to Individual Photos

The Light Table

Compare from a range of photos
Examine Details
Rating makes choice easier
See the camera settings

ShowFoto

For those who find the DigiKam interface a tad too technical, ShowFoto gives access to the same tools, with a popular interface.

Browsing
Image Properties
See image properties
Geolocation again
Preset zooms
Histogram
General Settings
Tooltip Options
Raw Image Settings
Colour Management Settings
File Saving Options
Configure a Slideshow

The project Home Page is here
A detailed User Manual is here. You will find these and many other screenshots there.

The support page of the project has links to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and to Mailing List subscription details.

There is a short video tour here.

The section on Digital Asset Management is no longer on the web pages, but in the manual, which may be present on your installation as digikam-doc, or you can download a set of .pdf files, digikam.pdf, showfoto.pdf and kipi-plugins.pdf

The blog Open Source Photo Processing Comes of Age by rm42 highlights developments since the KDE 3 version, and provides a useful tour.

We have a growing collection of tutorials that will help you get more enjoyment and productivity from digikam. The Digikam tutorials page lists them with a brief comment on content.

Tip

Click on the Photography category at the bottom of this page to see a list of all available tutorials for Digikam and Showfoto.

Useful digiKam Tricks

Transcribed from Dmitri Popov's blog, 26 September 2011

To quickly adjust thumbnail size in the Album view, press and hold the Ctrl key, then use the mouse scroll wheel to make the thumbnails larger or smaller.
With the Non-Destructive editing and Versioning feature enabled, digiKam automatically hides originals and displays the latest modified versions of the photos. For example, if you process a NEF file and save it in the JPEG format, digiKam hides the original RAW file and shows only the JPEG photo. To disable this feature, choose Settings -> Configure digiKam -> Editing Images and make sure that the Always show original images option in the In main view section is enabled. To keep things tidy, you can then group the original and all its versions. To do this, select the photos you want to group, right-click on the selection, and choose Group -> Group Selected Here.
```
The trash has reached its maximum size!  Cleanup the trash manually
```
If you receive this error message and emptying the Trash doesn’t help, then the following command may solve the problem:
```
rm ~/.local/share/Trash/metadata
```
Need to quickly locate all untagged photos? In digiKam, expand the Search left sidebar, and press the Advanced Search button. In the Advanced Search window, tick the Not Tagged check box and press OK to run the search.
Instead of the conventional thumbnail view, digiKam lets you map your photos on a globe. Choose View -> Map, and you should see photos from the current album mapped on the 3-D globe. You can then use the mouse to rotate the globe and the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Obviously, the Map view displays only geotagged photos.

digiKam 2.2.0 Installer for Windows

In his blog of 22 October, 2011, Dmitri Popov writes:

"Good news for those who want to run the latest version of digiKam on Windows. The SourceForge repository now has a Windows installer of the latest digiKam version courtesy of Ananta Palani.

I tested the installer with a Windows 7 machine, it worked like a charm. While the installer makes it supremely easy to deploy digiKam on Windows, the application does have a few quirks. Most notably, the Windows version of digiKam cannot import photos directly from storage media or cameras, so you need to copy them to the hard disk using Windows’ own built-in image transfer tool, and then add the transferred photos to digiKam. The Trash feature doesn’t work either, but you can work around this issue by deleting photos instead of sending them to the trash. To be fair, though, these issues are not caused by digiKam itself, but are due to bugs in the underlying KDE libraries which the application relies on."

Tutorials

There is a lot of tutorials about Digikam. The list is alphabetically sorted.