digiKam
digiKam is a Digital Asset Management application that includes powerful image editing functions and enables you to manage large numbers of digital photographs in albums. digiKam has many features for viewing, organizing, processing and sharing your photos using tags, captions, collections, dates, geolocation and searches.
I bought a new entry level DSLR camera, a Canon Rebel SL2, so I can take lots of high quality pictures for my websites. I also have a Samsung Note 9 and a Samsung S22 Ultra. Both of them have fantastic cameras. I also take a lot of screen shots for stories about computer science. I’m working on learning how to manage the pictures with digiKam.
From the looks of things, I would say that digiKam is another Katepart tool, but I don’t know that for sure. What I do know is that, it automatically displays with the theme colors of my KDE Plasma desktop.
Well Organized Image Production Studio
I’ve imported my pictures folder into digikam and now, when I transfer pictures from my cameras onto my computer, they are automatically available in digiKam. Once you import your photos into digiKam, you need to always use digiKam. You don’t want to go back and forth from using digiKam and Dolphin. That will create conflicts and cause problems.
Practice using Dolphin and digiKam together in your photo management workflow. Then add Raw Therapee and Gimp to your workflow. I’ve noticed that Gimp has tools for doing everything I use Raw Therapee for, so I may soon be able to just use Gimp. I would much rather use one tool for all of my image editing tasks.
There is a lot to learn. digiKam and Gimp, Inkscape and Krita are a very powerful set of tools for digital artisans. Learning how to get them all to work well together is going to take time and effort. Then there is the video editing tools, Kdenlive and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). Blender is a very amazing 3D drawing tool. Natron is opensource 2D animation software.
Each one of these tools is very complex and powerful, with a steep learning curve. I’ve already studied some of them fairly extensively. Read the manual. Practice using them. Watch videos and other tutorials about using them.
digiKam is a good place to start and it has pretty good documentation in the help directory. Just click on help and browse around and read as much as you need to. Get your photos organized well. Once you get them set up in digiKam, then always use digiKam for organizing your photos. Moving photos around in Dolphin can interfere with digiKam.
You can do much of your photo editing right in digiKam. You can resize, crop and rotate the images. Use Gimp to add value to your photographs.
Use these tools to create beautiful art to make your websites more attractive. Make sure you add the meta data for the search engines and for handicap access. You’ll spend hours getting each tool set up, and then, with practice, you’ll get more and more efficient creating and managing your digital art.
Practice Improves Performance
Learn how to work with the Raw picture format. It is the best way to work on editing your photos and then convert them into PNG or JPG photos, after you do all your editing.
JPG pictures lose quality every time you export them, so exporting your pictures in PNG format is much better for keeping your pictures crisp, when you are moving them around a lot. JPG works best for website photos, because they take up a lot less time and space in your image gallery and webpages.
Artisan Workflow
Now that you’ve tried out some of these applications, its time to develop a stable workflow. Repetition is the best learning strategy. Start using the same tools, over and over again. You can tweak your system over time, but get in the habit of integrating your photography into your stories, systematically.
First of all, you have a lot of stories that would be a lot more attractive with some photos sprinkled around in them. Figure out how to get the pictures of your neighborhood to make sense in your website. Spend some time and effort to get some photos added to the stories you already have posted.
Whenever you download a new set of images, put them into a new directory named for the date they were taken. I put a C for Camera, a P for Phone or SS for ScreenShot in front of a 6 or 8 digit date.
I’ve been hesitating to start using digiKam. I’ve figured out a fairly efficient way to manage my images manually in Dolphin. I think the way to get started is to take a directory full of about 100 images and download them into digiKam and start working with them. Figure out how digiKam works. See if it is the best solution for your circumstances.
If you like it, you can move your Pictures folder into digiKam and start working on automating the whole process. It may be a better idea to download each of your individual directories of images into digiKam separately.
One of the things I’ve learned by experience, about working with computers, is that you must be patient. Do not try to do it suddenly or all at once. Carefully work on gradually getting all your images migrated into digiKam.
Photography is an important part of Holistic Home Office. It’s all about creating content. Exercise your creative freedom.
Photo by Bob Mccoy using Spectacle Screenshot Photo by Bob Mccoy using Canon Rebel SL2 Photo by Bob Mccoy using Canon Rebel SL2