Digikam 7.0: Open-source photo management
digikam.org
digikam.org
ie families, or small organizations where the photos (and database) would reside on a computer, but other users on their computers could access it via the local network.
At the moment, this middle ground doesn't seem to exist. It's either single-user only photo management software or full-blown multi-user digital asset management software with enterprise-level pricing.
(Disclaimer: I'm the author, and wished the same thing you did, so I quit my job to build it).
https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/ has several.
I added one on the home page, too.
Darktable is for selecting a series of shots, going through them, developing the ones you want to keep.
It's nowhere near as polished as Photos, but it's capable, open source, and multi-platform. I hope to maintain my photo library for decades, so avoiding proprietary software / service lock-in was my most important consideration. This decision was reinforced earlier this year when we had to do some surgery on my spouse's meticulously curated Photos library: it's damned near impossible to completely preserve metadata when moving items between Photos libraries, and it is impossible to remove RAW files from stacked RAW+JPEG pairs in the Photos library. If I ever ran into those issues in digiKam (which I haven't), I'm confident that my SQL abilities would be sufficient to work around them.
So perhaps closer to Photo Mechanic?
(Disclaimer: I may be biased).
Overall photo editing with open source software is kind of a drag. The features are more or less there, the UX isn't.
I wonder why the state of open source alternatives is so sad and what can be done to improve the situation.
I never used lightroom, so I don't know what I might be missing.
One thing that kept me from post-processing a lot of my pictures was the necessity of doing it on the desktop. I'd come back from holidays and didn't really make the time, I guess it can be attributed to laziness.
Nowadays however, I have a subscription for Lightroom and can import the photos on my iPad and edit them on the go, or from the comfort of my couch. I love it.
When I fire up Lightroom classic on the desktop, it downloads everything (originals) I've uploaded on the iPad from the Lightroom cloud. Although this has some inconveniences - it's just dumped into a folder without any regard for organisation - it prevents a complete vendor lock-in. Without that feature I wouldn't have considered this approach.
I love to take pictures, but post-processing is not exactly my favourite activity. I feel that all the tricks I used to get me to develop more on the desktop (e.g. getting a midi board for editing) didn't really get me anywhere, but the Adobe cloud + iPad just did the trick for me.
Search for "External Raw Import Tools as Plugins". I suggest you take a look at rawtherapee as well. I personally use both darktable and rawtherapee and find rawtherapee to be better suited for some usecases.
Do you think a software aiding you into recognizing would help your life ? or are you fine with that condition now ?
I mainly see software helping me organize my photos. I have always dreamed of a Google Glass like thing that would instantly tell me who everyone is, but I think everybody would find it creepy. Of course currently people find it weird that it takes me >15 seconds to recognize a friend when it seems to take everybody barely 2 seconds.
Look at it like recognizing stuff like cars and watches. Somebody really into the space can tell you the brand of either immediately, and sometimes the model. Definitely a learned skill rather than innate like faces are for most.
Just saying, might be fun to try to train yourself to recognize your top X people, for science.
And I thought I had this disease. I think root of my issue most likely is that my brain is assuming that most people I see on the street or during parties I will never see again so it immediately forgets faces and names and only starts remembering when I encounter them few times.
I would imagine the most famous people who were diagnosed with prosopagnosia probably have something closer to what I have than you.
I also suspect that many celebrities who claim that they have it probably just have a bad memory. They are normally meeting a lot of people so it's not easy to remember faces.
It's getting better on the multi monitor front at least
Largely now without tweaks, but it needed some when I originally got it to use Kisak-mesa.
neofetch output: OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS x86_64 Host: NUC8i7HVK (REMOVED) Kernel: 5.4.0-42-generic Uptime: 5 hours, 7 mins Packages: 3266 (dpkg), 7 (snap) Shell: bash 5.0.17 Resolution: 2560x1440, 2560x1440 DE: Plasma WM: KWin Theme: Breeze [Plasma], Breeze [GTK2/3] Icons: breeze [Plasma], breeze [GTK2/3] Terminal: konsole CPU: Intel i7-8809G (8) @ 4.200GHz GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX Vega M GH GPU: Intel HD Graphics 630 Memory: 8898MiB / 32031MiB
Oddly enough, if I only have one monitor enabled, it doesn't happen. And yes, I've nuked my preferences several times.
* https://pointieststick.com/2020/07/24/this-week-in-kde-scree...
I can assure you that there are plenty of bugs on both sides :)
Edit: looking at other responses it seems that this still holds true, perhaps it's just Wayland support that's buggy, because it is new.
Is there an API or potential to use this in headless for integration in other apps such as web or Android? What about the automated cards and animations that Google Photos creates? Is there anything like that for Digikam or another app that can be self-hosted?
There's a janky browser script on GitHub that you inject into the page to delete your photos. That's what I had to use when I migrated to OneDrive.
And some Android phones are configured to automatically upload to Google Photos to "save space" on the device. I recovered thousands of lost photos for my parents that got deleted from their phones and uploaded to Google without their knowledge. My Dad has been backing up his photos for years, but half were missing from the backup because I found them on Google photos.
It took the browser automation script hours to delete all their photos after I got them out.
Even worse, when I was trying to remove duplicates from the set, I found that Google alters the metadata of the photos you export. So when you try to compare them you can't use regular diff tools
(I've looked at the sidecars from takeout, and the API). You might be able to scrape the metadata via puppeteer, but that's brittle and janktastic.
Plus, the interface is confusing and not very efficient (in aiding the matching/identification process).
> As you can see, work is advancing very well and we expect to publish new code later this summer, probably for digiKam 7.2.0 when all implementations will be tested and ready for production.
It is just sad to see that the imaging/image processing/image organizing world is still stuck in 1990s paradigm rather than embrace that the computers have gobs of memory, a single application can be composed of dozen of individual components talking to each other over 127.0.0.1 and background jobs is a thing.
- Maybe you are constantly trying it on the same distro that constantly has problems with its build for some reason or other. Consistent bad experience for the smaller number of users who conclude incorrectly that digikam is broken. For example suppose it uses out of date libraries that the software depends on.
- Maybe your configuration is unusual in some fashion and because of this consistently hits the same bug. If nobody reports it then it never gets fixed if it doesn't also effect a developers machine.
Neither of these is an indication that the projects low level architectural direction is problematic.
What we actually have is a tiny number of users who use Linux as a desktop that have pretty much identical use case with a small number of images succeed. All other workflows flop.
> Neither of these is an indication that the projects low level architectural direction is problematic.
In 2020 having a project where processing a corrupted file under any conditions causes the app to crash means the projects has a bad architecture.
lol, I've actually use Digikam on windows and mac because of how well it works for me
Pixar is an interesting case because as pioneers in their field they made a lot of their own tools and run them on Linux. Presumably unlike single user incentivized to select whatever they are used to they are instead liable to pick the best platform.
Pixar uses Linux
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/pixar-film-production...
Aftershot Pro, Lightworks, Maya, Bloom all seem to be pretty good.
They have in common that they charge money and thus have a budget. Pixars choice seems to suggest linux us a perfectly viable platform and these able tools seem to suggest we can have good tools if we are willing to invest our money in such. This isn't to say that such tools must be commercial. They could well be foss if we change the way we choose to support FOSS. Instead of heaping praise upon them we need to open our wallets and regularly.
So the same for all other complicated tasks.
It is not that handling run time errors has demonstrated to be a trivial tasks for a main app.
But huge albums are a problem for many programs, unfortunateley.
(Not a dozen components, though; just four. A main/watchdog service, a web service, a volume watchdog and directory scanner service, and a cluster of sync-file jobs).
Related: it was a total pita to handle real-time debugging until I made my own `tail -f` that sorted by timestamp and automatically updated as new processes added new log files).
It was specifically designed to handles hundreds of thousands of images and is in the final stages of release.
We have a little bit more information and screenshots on the website: https://www.pixolage.com and would be grateful for any community feedback (or beta testers!).
Disclaimer: I work at Pixolage
In terms of development, we prefer developing on lesser hardware so that we can be sure that Pixolage will run super smooth for most setups (although long compile waits can be frustrating).
For scalability, nothing beats multi-process. (Due to the way the OS manages communications between GPU driver<->process using the GPU).
Completely agree - Picasa is/was a great application!
I've been a Digikam user for a long time now, it's really useful for me, but the whole face-tagging system has been really poor for a long time IMO (eg all faces recognised in one image as same person; all tags recognised as being the last person manually tagged).
It's one thing I'd love to have donated to a bounty on as it saves a lot of time to have working tagging.
I wonder if there are plans to add other types of tagging, object recognition or what-have-you.
The project is huge and the core dev team quite small [1], essentially just two people and the occasional drive-by. This is one of those projects that I'd really like to see someone figure out a stable revenue stream. I'd guess that a lot of this is not "interesting" programming, but rather tedious "clocking in, clocking out" footwork.
I tried Digikam, but their face eh recognition discovered also lots of non-faces. The UI also was not fun to use. You click on a suggestion and it takes several seconds before you could type either the name, or pick one. All that with a relatively small collection (2TB).
I hear ya, brother! I still have the final version of Picasa for Windows and Linux. What a shame it's proprietary.