I checked out Digikam recently because my camera didn't support PTP but instead a custom protocol and I wanted to copy pictures over (Dolphin had no support). Sadly, Digikam had to mess with the metadata of each picture and put its name inside. Which contribution has the program done other than download the picture from the camera? So I went to using an SD card reader instead.
Not really a default. When you start up Digikam for the first time a prompt asks if you would like information saved to the files or not. If you select no information is stored in a local Digikam DB.
I wish there was photo management software which catered to non-enterprise multi-user environments.
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.
PhotoStructure is absolutely designed for self-hosted family-and-friends access of local photos and videos. You'll get installation instructions emailed to you shortly after you subscribe to the beta. https://PhotoStructure.com
(Disclaimer: I'm the author, and wished the same thing you did, so I quit my job to build it).
Any chance the website could show a screenshot or something? It’s just a generic thing right now and I have no interest in signing up to something I can’t see.
Sorry for somewhat unrelated query: is Digikam a replacement for Darktable? If not what's a good workflow between the two? I am a hobbyist photo taker and have only recently started using Darktable and really enjoy using it. However, it isn't a very efficient photo manager in my opinion (I may very well be missing something).
I would say they're complementary. Digikam is more of an all-around organizer and has lots of import/export stuff, tagging, and now good face recognition too apparently (the old one was based on classic Haar cascades).
Darktable is for selecting a series of shots, going through them, developing the ones you want to keep.
Darktable's targets digital photography enthusiasts or professionals. The learning curve is steep. Picasa's target demographic was "everyone". So probably Digikam.
I can confirm. Every now and then I want to edit some of my photos and run Darktable, only then to remember it has zero automation and a hundred of sliders for individual adjustments. It definitely requires dedication to use, more of that than I have to give for holiday photo editing.
You can get by using the same 5 sliders for almost all your photos. The other sliders remain available for edge cases or when you want to go the extra mile.
I'm not sure how seamless the experience is on macOS, but I'm happily using digiKam on Linux as an iPhoto/Photos replacement.
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.
I haven't seen anything open source that comes close to Lightroom, even if you only consider LR versions from ten years ago. Although LR used to have the habit of getting really slow with larger libraries, it mostly just works and doesn't get in the way, while stuff like darktable is just... weird. Darktable has similar issues to GIMP, as in, that it hypothetically has a lot of features, but the usability is pretty poor overall, and it lacks some pretty vital things. GIMP only did 8 bit color until recently and a lot of operations are comically slow, while darktable has a very low legibility UI and keyboard shortcuts that don't make a lot of sense (e.g. navigation keys are different between modes), it isn't good at actualling keeping a library of photos, and crucially it has no way to quickly go to 100/200/400 % magnification (in LR you could hold the middle mouse button to instantly snap to 400 % iirc, extremely useful, completely absent in darktable).
Overall photo editing with open source software is kind of a drag. The features are more or less there, the UX isn't.
Lightroom classic is good, the new one is complete trash as far as UI and performance goes, same with all other new Adobe products. Illustrator, Photoshop. I guess they moved to web tech on the desktop, too.
I agree with the sentiment on the new Lightroom being trash, although I do think something nice came out of Adobe's efforts of the past few years.
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.
Very sad, but true. I’m still using LR6. Even though the map view doesn’t work any more and it cannot handle anything shot with my phone it is still the best option.
I wonder why the state of open source alternatives is so sad and what can be done to improve the situation.
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.
Sadly, even at version 7.0, it (Digikam) still doesn't support virtual albums/collections, and it insists on direct album-file_system_directory correlation. Unfortunently, it is useless to me as an image/photo organizer. (I don't really see tags as a substitute).
I haven't tried this out yet, but from the release notes it sounds like the new facial recognition system will be better than I am. I am not good at recognizing faces and have been waiting for quite some time for a good open source tool to recognize faces with.
According to Wikipedia it is called prosopagnosia [1]. I have never been formally diagnosed, but I cannot even recognize the faces of my own family members to save my life. Having software that sorts faces will be great. Given that I only use open source software, I am quite excited for this new release.
> I have never been formally diagnosed, but I cannot even recognize the faces of my own family members to save my life.
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.
LOL, after editing the comment I cut out the important part. What I meant to say is that I thought I had that disease, but after reading the comment I doubt I have it.
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.
I have learned to live with it. Basically whenever I meet someone I say, "hey, I can't recognize faces". I still recognize people but only by clothing, hair, facial hair or black thereof, etc. If someone gets a haircut, it completely throws me off.
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.
I've read you can train yourself to be decent. It would be interesting to use output from facial recognition software as "flashcards" for yourself.
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.
KDE software is so great (digiKam, Kdenlive, Kate, Krita) unfortunately the KDE environment compared to Gnome is just so bug-ridden, especially when it comes to multi-monitoring, wayland-support and scaling. Gnome shines in these respecst. I wish thebest of both worlds!
My experience is totally the opposite. In fact, at work we are now migrating many of our computers from GNOME to KDE because we are really tired of GNOME's bugs (and it's "too simple to the point of being useless" interface).
Indeed there are. We use CentOS, I have been testing CentOS 8 for several months without problems, and suddenly the numpad and special keys like Alt stopped working for KDE programs. Why? I don't know :/
I have the same problem consistently on PopOS which uses GNOME just across two monitors.
As a bonus, in the redistribution process, windows are randomly resized to a lot larger sizes. I suspect this is related to me leveraging the experimental scaling features in GNOME which is hard to avoid using 27inch 4K monitors.
Really wish the window management would be more polished but I have no skill in that domain to make it better.
I'm running three screens and don't have the same problem. I did a clean format before installing KDE, though, just because that computer had been upgraded from one version to another for around ten years.
I would even venture to say that, as I discovered last month with several Debian setups, it is the best multi-monitor plug'n'play experience I have had so far.
I believe the preferred environment for KDE is one in which you are liable to have the most recent libraries including bug fixes which sadly has often not been the case for people using kde + ubuntu.
I can't speak to Wayland support, but almost all the bugs I've seen with plasma appear to be GPU specific. My laptop with Intel graphics runs KDE rock solid, while my desktops with Nvidia cards have all sorts of issues, and nouveau had different issues compared to the binary drivers.
I stopped using Ubuntu 10 years ago, because I couldn't stand how buggy it was, but later I realized it was mostly GNOME. It's interesting how things turned around.
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.
I'm currently using Google Photos for facial recognition, however since they broke their Google Drive integration I'd like to move away from it. For now I am using a combination of Syncthing, the Google Photos interface and rclone.
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?
Nextcloud is self-hosted solution and there is plugin for it that allows you to recognize and cluster faces (to persons) using DLib: https://github.com/matiasdelellis/facerecognition. This might be close to what you need (while Nextcloud is huge software on its own, it is not best photo management app)
Is it possible to get digikam to store files in a simple date based directory structure? I really wanted to like digikam, but ended up using rapid-photo-downloader instead because it was so easy to setup that way, and it keeps me from being too locked in to software that might go away.
I'm happy to hear this and hope it works. Apple's iPhoto used to do good face recognition but as soon as you exported photos the information was lost. I hope this can store the face rectangles and their IDs in the photo's metadata.
Are the people tags saved to the photo's file metadata somehow? I've thrown about 130,000 photos up to google photos for safe-keeping but want a second set of redundancy.
Just so you know... Google Photos is full of dark patterns. For example there's no way to mass delete pictures. It simply doesn't exist.
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
If you use the Album>Write Metadata to Files command, it will do so. (I just tested adding a Face Tag to a photo. In Settings>Configure>Metadata, I also checked the box next to Face Tags under Write This Information to the Metadata. This latter action didn't seem to be enough by itself.)
Bah! I was really hoping Digikam's face recognition was going to work at least as well as the 10+ yr old Picassa that I'm trying to replace... but I'm not having any luck - pretty disappointing matching. Even with dozens of images manually identified it is failing to match the same person correctly in other pictures.
Plus, the interface is confusing and not very efficient (in aiding the matching/identification process).
Then you will be happy to know that they are working on exactly those problems right now (see the article part and look for summer of code).
> 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.
Every year for at least last 5 years I have been trying Digikam. Every year like 99.9% of the reasonably complicated GUI-based single process multi-functional software written on Linux it would blow up while working with marginally large sets of files (~ 50k photos, roughly evenly split between 24 megapixel NEF files and random resolution jpegs )
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.
(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).
Thanks, I'm going to play with it as it is the closest thing to what I think can function well even though I did not mean using a web browser as an interface.
Conversely the a singular anecdote also doesn't mean it doesn't work either. I strongly suspect that when you have a largish body of people are using something without issue and one person is constantly experiencing problems there might be a reason why.
- 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.
It is not unusual. Contrary to what people in Linux world believe its desktop software that deals with visual image and video processing is atrocious. That's why no one ( rhetorical no one ) uses it rather than Windows or Macs for their photo libraries. It is definitely the case for the software that tries to manipulate RAW files from modern cameras.
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.
I would guess more people use Windows and Mac because it is the path of least resistance and presumably they are more heavily invested in learning their art and the many complexities of the tools required.
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.
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.
Right, computers do have loads of RAM. So just spin up a chromium fork for the UI, and a handful of http servers for the different background tasks, pull in a bazillion of dependencies, and... it's gone. The RAM, that is.
No, spin up a worker that listens on a queue and thumbnails an image on request so in an event the thumbnailer crashes on a corrupted image the entire app does not die.
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.
Realistically you wouldn't want to run libparsealltheformats inside your main app anyway, because that's just obvious madness in case someone uses it on files from the Internet and not just files created by their non-evil camera. Of course, everyone does anyway.
I mean, if you're a bad programmer, sure. But we've had multi-core systems for decades at this point, one should know at least basic MT techniques, or, short of that, not to fuck with resources cross-thread unless you know what you're doing
Since we know the programs have bugs, photo formats evolve, some of the files are intentionally broken by "evil things" should not we write complex programs taking that into account rather than think that everyone else is an amateur and our code is so state of the art it will just handle bad conditions flawlessly?
We are working on a multi-process GPU accelerated image viewer with the ability to seamlessly browse and organise through hundreds of thousands of photos. Although it is multi process, all applications are embedded in a container application. The processes communicate using 127.0.0.1. All done locally.
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!).
Performance is great on single thread/single CPU, but performance is even better when doing multi-threaded for most scenarios.
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!
Yep, for the moment its Windows only, however, the vast majority of the core code is platform agnostic, so after the initial Windows release, we shall be targeting Mac and Linux.
I had dozens of photographer friends try importing their multi TB photo libraries into different Linux systems using all kinds of photo management software. They all choke. Shotwell is the most stable but even it will crash every few few weeks and that would periodically require reimporting all the photos again...
My library is only 50k raw files, and Lightroom is not exaxtly fast either. Browsing the library, scrolling, etc. is sluggish. On a powerful workstation, 24 threads, 128gb ram, etc
The macOS version is distributed as a .pkg and isn't signed or notarized. That's a no-go for me. Any reason why they don't just ship a .app in a disk image?
Most likely because nobody on the development team has the time to keep up with Apple's treadmill of ever changing Gatekeeper requirements. If you're knowledgeable about such matters, see it as your chance to contribute.
See the "Deep-Learning Powered Faces Management" section of the linked document for a lot more information. Specifically, they mention that they replaced the old (OpenCV) algorithm with a new neural-net based one.
If it is same software https://github.com/matiasdelellis/facerecognition has been using (DLib, King's face model) - I can say it is very, very good! Yes, there can be lamppost here and there, but it is miles ahead of OpenCV haar cascade
In they link they said that previous version was about 80% successful, now it's 95% and doesn't have issues with blurred images, profiles, various obstructions, pet faces etc.
This comment seems mean, perhaps. But, Picasa's facial recognition was far better than Digikam's and I marveled at how Picasa could do so quickly, so long ago, what Digikam has failed to do (until now?).
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.
Yeah, the the comment does sound mean. Not to blame you, since you indicate that you understand this.
The digikam devs can be court at times, but that's mostly because many people show up with great expectations; mostly expectations of having someone else implement this or that. I shouldn't throw stones here really, I was one of those people a few years back.
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 think that comment is more "Picasa was amazing" than "Digikam is bad", and it's right, Picasa was amazing. Hopefully Digikam will reach those levels soon.
It was. I have searched long for a similar program (mainly face recognition) and couldn't find one. Github is full of POC for that, but nothing in a "complete" package.
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).
