app review: digikam

as phil pointed out in comments to my earlier review of shotwell, it urged me to check out digikam. as you must be already aware, it's one-click install with ubuntu software center. so, i installed digikam ;)


it has a nice little picture splash screen for launch. after launch, on first startup, it asks a lot! well, that's needed to know you better. the options are self-explanatory.

digikam launching

where images are?

Preview mode options!

i've skipped some screenshots to keep it brief. there were other options too which i don't use, regarding raw images and tooltips. you can check out for yourself when you install digikam.

Final screen of fist time configuration of digikam.

as you can notice, it's a heavy program and takes time to load. though it was initially scanning for images in the defined picture folder,

digikam: looking for images in folder.

it still took time loading previews.

digikam program window.

frankly, my experience with digikam wasn't as smooth as shotwell or any other photo manager. it looked a bit heavy on my old hardware. there are a lot of import/export modules in digikam which is a good thing if you have your photos scattered all around. however, i think people generally use one or two such services only. i didn't test importing and exporting.

there aren't simple image editing tools. i might be wrong here, but it looks like it has image editing capabilities derived from gimp. though i use, shotwell for managing photos and gimp for editing them, this is a one package deal. 

digikam's image editor

the only weird deal here is the spike in cpu usage. i know my hardware is little bit 6 year old, it shot it to 100% while doing this calculation. it's a nice way which i like to present the changes it is going to take. i really liked it. but the time it took to compute that is my concern. gimp has a progress bar which digikam misses.

here's my cpu usage around this filter. you can notice the usage. don't worry about my internet connection, i wasn't downloading anything ;)

final words. 

digikam offers a nice package of tools and somewhat nice ways to manage your photos based on tags and others. it also has fuzzy search to search for images. for those who like to do everything inside a single software, this would be a great deal. however, it lacks auto-grouping of images (like shotwell does). it offers a great set of import/export options, covers almost everything. however, the only thumbs down from me is cpu utilization. even for browsing photos, this was kind of not upto the mark. i feel bit sluggish. user interface is great however bit complex if you are just going to manage photos.