Digikam: An iPhoto Replacement for Linux

When looking at photo management applications, iPhoto, the photo management application by Apple, has fast become a standard (or at least a standard template) for other programs. Linux has three applications that follow iPhoto's general look and feel - F-Spot (for the Gnome desktop), Picasa (from Google), and Digikam (for the KDE desktop). This review will go over one of the newest of these programs - Digikam, which describes itself as Photo Management For The Masses.

Digikam truly is a Swiss Army knife of photo management. Using two other open-source projects (dcraw for downloading photos off digital cameras and gphoto2 for accessing digital cameras), Digikam supports more than 200 proprietary camera file formats and more than 700 different cameras. As well, Digikam supports cameras using USB, Firewire and serial connections.

Unlike F-Spot, which only gives the user a few ways of viewing photos (which could have to do with F-Spot's comparatively shorter development time), Digikam allows the user to arrange photos by albums, date imported, tagging (similar to what F-Spot uses), and - like "smart" searches or folders in Mac OS X, Digikam can also give the user a constantly changing library based on a saved search.

Perhaps the best thing Digikam has going for it is a companion library titled DigikamImagePlugins. While Digikam has - on its own - a fairly standard set of image manipulation features, such as crop, zoom, rotate and color adjustments, DigikamImagePlugins adds much more. Included in this plugin (which should be available for all users to download from their Linux distribution), are filters and effects one might associate with Photoshop or GIMP, such as distortion effects, oil pain and level adjustment.