Digikam Documentation
Lane Stefano
A new year means new goals, and this one is a challenge: migrating the old digiKam documentation based on DocBook format to a new architecture, more simple and easy to maintain.After 20 years, we left the DocBook manual for the modern Sphinx/ReStructuredText framework. This one is really a pleasure to use by documentation writers.
The new documentation is now open for contributions, to fix contents and add new sections/chapters. Please look at the dedicated git repository,and especially the README file where you will find all technical details to help us with this manual.
My intention is to use work with my picture library which is on a cloud drive but I shall probably have to relocate them to a NAS. The setup requires that the database files are stored on a local drive which is fine except that the digiKam manual suggests I save the database on /var/local/lib/digiKam. Interesting but there is no /var/local/ directory in Tumbleweed at present. I could create that directory but I suspect there is a preferred alternative and seek advice on that please. Also what ownership and permissions should I use for the digiKam database folder here?
My second question refers to the FAQ and possible troubles with locking when working with album on a network share. It is recommended that I use a symlink for the sqlite database file. What symlink and where?
Hi all and many thanks for the guidance. My initial excursion was from a laptop but I have now opted to use my main workstation hard drives and adopted a straight forward setup using my master media photos directory which has a few pictures in it already.
All good so far but what next I ask? This reminds me of a similar problem with tagging classical music, an exercise in cladistic taxonomy; where should I start, particularly with the folder structure? Year>Month>file date?
Will read the manual and ask if I get stuck.
Budge
Think perhaps how you would arrange your photographs if you were doing it manually. DigiKam allows Albums (Directories of images) to have Sub-Albums (Sub-directories of images), that may be useful in deciding the hierarchy of directory structure used.
My digikam db and all the pics are on remote NFS storage. The fact that digikam claims that this is unsupported does not mean it does not work. It does have a performance penalty especially when you do db heavy lifting like face recognition. NFSv3 was crawling but NFSv4 works okay-ish. I can live with that as it keeps everything in once place and accessible from all clients on my home network. There used to be an option to use a real RDBMS like mysql or postgres. I did try this once but then dropped it as the overhead of running the db server was more work than just waiting for sqlite.
/var/localVariable data for programs that are installed in /usr/local (i.e., programs that have been installed by the system administrator). Note that even locally installed programs should use the other /var directories if they are appropriate, e.g., /var/lock.
/usr/localThe place for locally installed software and other files. Distributions may not install anything in here. It is reserved solely for the use of the local administrator. This way he can be absolutely certain that no updates or upgrades to his distribution will overwrite any extra software he has installed locally.
I have digikam using mariadb with the database stored in a folder in my home directory which is on SSD. I switched to mariadb on SSD when the photos on the disk grew beyond 500 GB and the scans for new items started to take a large amount of time. Eventually I bought a 2 TB SSD which could easily fit my photos, the database, and all my other accumulated non-photography stuff.
Hi
I have read the links about using mariadb and a network server. The descriptions are old. It was some release notes in late digikam 6-series that the use was suggested of tree tables for performance:
Hi and my thanks to all in helping me with my first excursion with digiKam.
I have been able to do a good deal of housework gathering most of my pictures from the last 50 years. Many are still being scanned but I have made a start.
I have done as suggested in keeping things simple as others have done above and have found the tools most helpful.
I think I probably will need a new NAS and I shall then look again at the database advice above but at the moment I only am working with a couple of thousand picture so all good and I think this thread should be closed.
I am trying to decide between Tropy and Digikam to organize my collections of photos of artwork and artefacts. (I may be a historian, but I work with printed sources- paleography gives me a headache). Your documentation page imples that the core use case of Tropy is archival research.
Digikam includes the option to sort files in an album by "manual and name" or "manual and date." However, I haven't been able to find any way to "manually" reorder files. The official documentation doesn't seem to elaborate on this. Has anyone used this feature?
Reorder the images as described above. Mark all images. Press "F2" or select menu "item", submenu "rename". A box appears with intuitive controls to rename the files. Usually, I use "number, three digits". After that, I end up with files numbered in the correct order.
digiKam runs on most known desktop environments and window managers, as long as the required libraries are installed. It supports all major image file formats, such as JPEG and PNG as well as over 200 raw image formats[4] and can organize collections of photographs in directory-based albums, or dynamic albums by date, timeline, or by tags. Users can also add captions and ratings to their images, search through them and save searches for later use. Using plug-ins, users can export albums to various online services including (among others) 23hq, Facebook, Flickr, Gallery2, Google Earth's KML files, Yandex.Fotki, MediaWiki, Rajce, SmugMug, Piwigo, Simpleviewer, Picasa Web Albums. Plug-ins are also available to enable burning photos to a CD and the creation of web galleries.
digiKam provides functions for organizing, previewing, downloading and/or deleting images from digital cameras. Basic auto-transformations can also be deployed on the fly during picture downloading. In addition, digiKam offers image enhancement tools through its KIPI (KDE Image Plugins Interface) framework and its own plugins, like red-eye removal, color management, image filters, or special effects. digiKam was the only free photo management application on Linux that could handle 16 bit/channel images, until RawTherapee version 4.0 was released in 2011, using a new 32 bits/channel engine for all internal image processing.[5] Digital Asset Management is the mainstay of digiKam.
digiKam relies on libraries such as exiv2, allowing it to edit XMP metadata embedded in images or separately as sidecar files.[6] It also supports DNG format reading and writing. Marble is also integrated for editing and viewing of geolocations in images.
digikam also efficiently caches image thumbnails and paths in a database,[7] in the PGF format,[8] allowing for quick overviews. There are various database backends to choose from, with scalability and portability considerations taken into account.[9] This database file is independent of photo libraries, enabling remote paths, multiple roots and offline backups.
As of version 0.9 features include a GPS locator[10] and synchronization,[11] iPod Photo upload support,[12] an advanced metadata editor,[13] better support for raw image formats (using dcraw included in digiKam), full color management, a light-table,[14] pan-tool in Image Editor and Preview mode, improvements in usability, and many new plugins.
Starting with version 2.0, digiKam has introduced face recognition allowing you to automatically identify photos of certain people and tag them. DigiKam's photo manager was the first free project to feature similar functionality, with face recognition previously implemented only in proprietary products such as Google Picasa, Apple's Photos, and Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Face recognition was implemented in version 2.0 through the libface library, and from version 3.3 it is based on OpenTLD project work. Version 7.0.0-beta1 uses the Deep Neural Network module from the OpenCV library.
In this article I present a step-by-step walkthrough of my photography workflow. I won'tgo through all the details of every piece of software I mention, they have their ownmanuals and documentation for that, I will highlight the operations I do.
I use the fantastic Digikam software to organize my wholephoto collection (181708 photos and 3127 videos in 2198 albums as of March 2022). I use itto download photos from my cameras because it has a useful "Only new items" filter, so onconnect I would only see whatever is new.
Most of my photos are classified in albums by date, Digikam also helps with this as I canselect all photos taken on the same date with a click on its section title, then I use"Download Selected" option.
Once all photos are downloaded I switch to Geeqie to browsethrough them and remove all bad ones (unfocused, blurry, under or overexposed, etc.)I have been using it ever since it was called GqView, and by now it's mostly the force ofhabit.
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