jmoiron.net

I've tried writing this 5 different times and each time I've gotten caught up in the Unix philosophy, command line interfaces, Janis Joplin, and linguistics. Clearly, I should have let this one sit.

8 years ago, I went on a vacation to Portugal with my family and was the man in charge of our Nikon point & shoot digital camera. Set free by the lack of film pressure, and carrying my university laptop, I snapped around 1000 photos. Since then I've shot another 17000 photos. This past weekend, I felt like it was finally time to start going through them and organizing them.

I can't go away on vacation, shoot over a thousand photos, then come back and mix them in with pictures of my feet or my living room; I create a directory, throw them in there, call it something descriptive, and forget about them. For my first year and a half of DSLR use, I shot RAWs, which means that I still have thousands of undeveloped ~10M a pop RAW files lying around. Occasionally, I'd have to dump my photos of parties and nothing in particular, and I'd just throw them into a "misc" directory. This has passed for organization.

The startup cost to using photo management software has always felt prohibitively expensive, but I knew if I didn't want to store a couple hundred megabytes of white balance calibration exposures indefinitely; if I wanted to really develop my best shots and get the online in an organized way, with galleries and tags, I'd need help. I had a number of requirements, some of which I think are probably common, and some of which are probably uncommon:

• Lots of files (18000) taking up lots of space (82 GB)
• mixed Canon CR2 RAW and JPEG
• two older cameras (one Nikon and one Canon) had no orientation data
• needed a way to export organizational data
• need to be able to move around & delete files
• touchup capabilities, geotagging, and other advance features not as important as organizational workflow

Any google search for linux photo management will show you that my options were limited. Since GQView hasn't been updated in 4 years (and boy does it look it), the only serious contenders are DigiKam, F-Spot, and Google's Picasa. They're all problematic.

F-Spot and DigiKam, for applications that are 5 years old, are a mess. I understand completely that these kinds of things can take forever when you're doing it as a hobby, but my needs require something a bit more than that. F-Spot is way too slow to manage my photos, and can't do half of the things I want to do anyway. It has that "management" disease where it likes to pretend my filesystem doesn't exist. DigiKam is a KDE application, which means it's just as preoccupied with allowing me to move its toolbar, change the available buttons and icons on the toolbar, as it is with giving me a thousand different half-baked views of my images. It has a toolbar lining every edge of the main application window, ready to open and close panes and split panes and change the very application meny when I so much as click an image. It's all very depressing; they're still not caught up to the iPhoto of 8 years ago, even in its disgusting brushed-metal suit.

The last program I tried was Picasa. I tried it last because it never was a "real" linux application (Picasa for Linux is Picasa for Windows with a customized WINE environment and the Gecko engine), and because it apparently has no future on the linux platform. That's a real shame, because it's hands down the best application available for my needs, and probably for the needs of everyone else. Unfortunately, a 4 year old article came to the same conclusion; I'm not nearly as hopeful for the future of F-Spot (written in a language many Linux hackers don't know or don't care to learn) nor DigiKam (with its UI/UX philosophy).

Picasa has a few downsides when it comes to the end goal, which is to have photos on my website. It will only conveniently upload to Picasa web albums, which is something I don't particularly want. It exports galleries as an XML file with a bunch of size-converted images, but the gallery XML doesn't have much information in it. Tags get written to the IPTC "Keywords" field of the images; so long as I have tags and galleries, I think I'm fine.