[Discuss] Last Night's VLUG Meeting

[John Blomfield]

Thanks very much Murry. I shall try them all and see which one is likely 
to suit my wife's needs.

John


Murray Strome wrote:
> 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
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