[Discuss] Last Night's VLUG Meeting

[Murray Strome]

John Blomfield wrote:
> Incidentally, my wife currently uses HP photo software (free with the 
> Printer) for managing the printing on her HP Photosmart 8450 printer, 
> which allows full control over, number of photos per page, layout etc 
> plus photo album, viewing and editing features.  I personally am not 
> much interested in photography so have been unable to come up with a 
> compatible Linux alternative - can anyone recommend some suitable 
> Linux programs to do this sort of thing?  How about the hplip driver?
>
> John
I don't know much about the HP Photo Software, so I am not sure of all 
of its capabilities. I have been "playing with" a number of LINUX based 
photo organization tools.  I am planning (some day) to try to write a 
review on them, but haven't gotten around to it yet.  Here are the ones 
I have looked at so far:

Picasa2  (also available for Windows) http://picasa.google.com/linux/
                         This uses Wine and Firefox
JAlbum    (also available for Windows, Mac, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, etc.)
                  http://jalbum.net/software/download/current/all-systems
DigiKam   KDE based photo organizer        http://www.digikam.org/
KPhotoAlbum  KDE based photo organizer  http://www.kphotoalbum.org/
F-Spot    Gnome based photo organizer        http://f-spot.org/

I have used Picasa2 on Windows computers. It is very easy to use, and 
very intuitive. I have tested it in LINUX, and it seems to work very 
well.  Its main limitation is that it does not handle subdirectories 
very well. If you have a gmail account with Google, it is great for 
uploading photos and albums to the Picasa Web site for sharing with 
friends.  The photo editing tools that are included work extremely well 
and are VERY easy to use (much easier than GIMP, for example, but not as 
powerful). It is not included in any of the Kubuntu/Ubuntu/Debian 
repositories that I have on my system so would have to be downloaded and 
installed from Google.

JAlbum is most the most widely supported of all of these on multiple 
platforms. It is essentially a Java based product. Like Picasa, you can 
open a free JAlbum account and store/share photos from their website 
(limit is 30MB as compared to 1GB with Google's Picasa). I played with 
it a bit, but didn't see any advantage over Picasa2. It is not included 
in any of the Kubuntu/Ubuntu/Debian repositories that I have on my 
system so would have to be downloaded and installed from JAlbum.org

DigiKam comes pre-installed with Kubuntu.  It is quite useful, and 
integrates well with the GIMP. It handles RAW photos as well as the 
usual JPEG, TIFF, PNG, etc.  If I remember correctly, it puts all the 
photos into one directory, and may need to make copies of the photos, 
but I am not certain about that. One excellent feature (at least I find 
it to be the case) is that you can use it to find duplicate or nearly 
duplicate photos and decide which of them you wish to discard.  For 
example, you could have a particular photo as downloaded from your 
camera as something like IMG_001.RAW. Perhaps you have manipulated it 
with GIMP and saved a version as John_Doe.tif. Then you might have 
rescaled it for sending by E-mail and called it John_640X480.jpg.  You 
might have made another version as a gray scale image and called it 
John_BW.jpg. DigiKam will find and display all of those images and let 
you decide if you want to keep any or all of them. It uses EXIF data 
effectively. It is available in the Kubuntu/Ubuntu repositories.

KPhotoAlbum is definitely the BEST photo organizing tool I have seen.  
It creates a database for your photos.  Like all data bases, the 
difficult part is deciding just what are the important features, keys, 
tags, etc. and then entering all the relative information about each 
photo. One of its strengths is that you can include photos that are not 
actually stored on your computer. For example, you could include all the 
photos that you have transferred to CDs or DVDs.  When you do a query, 
for example, on all the photos you have of "Bill Smith", it would show 
you thumbnails of those that are on your computer, and the data base 
information about all of the ones that are not on the computer, but 
where they are (e.g. Photo_DVD1). It makes very effective use of EXIF 
data. While it SHOULD be well integrated with GIMP, the last version I 
tried (several months ago) had trouble with this feature. It is 
available in the Kubuntu repositories.

F-Spot is quite popular, although I have not tried it myself. I think it 
is Gnome based, Although I could download and install it in KDE, it did 
not work in Kubuntu 7.10 on my computer.

I hope that you might find some of this to be helpful to you.  When I 
get around to doing a better test of these packages, I will post a link 
to my review.

Murray