Managing Your Digital Photos: Day 3

Installing DigiKam

We'll be working with a free software photo manager called DigiKam. We used its included photo viewer Showfoto last week, and this week we'll use the photo manager part.

The flash drive has a copy of the DigiKam installer for Windows:

On the flash drive
In the folder "course"
In the folder "software"
The installer is named digiKam-5.7.0-02-Win32.exe. Double click it to install it.
DigiKam will install in the Windows Start menu, under "All Apps", "DigiKam-5.7"

(If you have a Mac, download the Mac installer from the DigiKam Download Page)

Managing Photos in DigiKam

Open DigiKam via the Windows Start menu, "All Apps", "DigiKam 5.7", "DigiKam".

The first time you open DigiKam, it will ask waaay too many questions.
The most important question is "Where do you want to store photos". For this class, choose the flash drive's DCIM folder. On your own machine, choose your main photos folder.

The right side menu, including "Properties" through "Tools", works like Showfoto from last week. It's there to show you info about a single selected photo. (Use the "Image Editor" tool to get the Showfoto style cropping and color fix tools.)

Many of DigiKam's features help you manage the actual photo files and folders on your computer:

On the left side, "Albums" lists all your photo folders.
On the left side, "Dates" shows you a list of photos by date, while "Timeline" lets you search for a date range. These are both based on the date stored in the photo file, which is set by the camera date, so it can be wacky at times.
On the left side, "Similarity" helps you find duplicate photos. To do this, it needs to build "fingerprints" of all the photos, which takes a long time if you have lots of photos.
On the left side, "Map" puts the photos on a map, although this only works if your

Some of DigiKam's features are internal to DigiKam, and get stored in its database, which isn't useful on other machines or programs. I personally don't like investing a lot of effort in this sort of feature, because in a few years I'd need to do it again in some new system.

On the left side, "Tags" and "Labels" can help you sort your photos, although these tags and labels are only stored within DigiKam.
DigiKam's image ratings, from zero stars to five stars, let you find your best photos immediately. However, the ratings are only stored within DigiKam.
On the left side, "People" is designed to use face recognition to let you name faces. It didn't do a very good job on my photos (Facebook's face recognition is much more reliable).

All the details are in the DigiKam manual.

Managing Your Digital Photos is an Osher Lifelong Learning Institute course taught by Dr. Orion Lawlor.