Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

After Luca’s blog entry about Digikam, I decided to take a quick look at it this afternoon.

Installation is easy enough (this is Gentoo, after all ), but don’t forget to also install the media-plugins/digikamimageplugins package. Without the extras included there, Digikam’s somewhat castrated, and you won’t get to see what the package can really achieve. (I didn’t realise this package existed first time around, and I suspect I won’t be the only one. Adding a ‘plugins’ USE flag to media-gfx/digikam would be a very helpful hint to Gentoo users!)

Digikam seemed quick enough importing my picture library. Like F-Spot, whilst the import is going on, you can’t use Digikam for anything else. Picasa lets you access your existing albums whilst you are importing new images, but that’s hardly a killer feature

Although Digikam comes advertised as supporting RAW files, I had no success this afternoon. Digikam didn’t give me the option of importing Nikon NEF files from disk at all. There’s no external dependency on dcraw; Digikam ships with its own C++ port of Dave Coffin’s original C code. Picasa will at least import RAW files, even if the EXIF-stripping problem makes the imported image undesirable. I’m guessing that Digikam’s RAW support is currently confined to importing RAW files direct from a camera, rather than handling them on disk. The handbook also states that RAW support is limited to thumbnail viewing only; there’s no support for RAW files in the image editor.

The rotation tool can be found in the Image Plugins. Unlike Picasa, it doesn’t offer a freehand rotation feature. With this plugin, rotation happens in a dialog box, where you can specify the amount of desired rotation using a slider or by manually entering the required angle of rotation. A handy preview is shown, to help you get the image rotated just right. I found Picasa’s freehand rotation much nicer to use, partly because it’s really freehand, and partly because you’re not working on a smaller preview image. Digikam doesn’t overlay a grid at all, making it just little bit harder to get your horizon lined up truly level

Like Picasa, there’s no equivalent of Photoshop Element’s Healing Tool in the standard Digikam. The Inpainting Plugin is the closest Digikam has, but it’s most useful for painting over items in an otherwise clear sky. However, unlike Picasa, Digikam comes with a number of plugins (Unsharp Mask, Hot Pixels Correction, Lens Distortion Correction, Restoration, Refocus, Noise Reduction and Anti-Vignetting) which photographers will find very useful.

Digikam’s colour correction in many ways is better than Picasa. There’s great support for adjusting the levels of individual colour channels - a feature sorely lacking in Picasa. However you want to edit your colours, Digikam supports it … except for one. Photoshop Elements (and Picasa) allow you to adjust the colour balance by selecting an area of the image that is intended to be black, white, or grey. Elements analyses the colour tint of the selected area, and uses it to fix the colours in the whole image. It’s a real timesaver, and unfortunately I’ve not been able to find the same tool in Digikam. You can do the same adjustments “by hand”, by editing values in one of Digikam’s many colour editing dialog boxes; but this takes longer, and is more error-prone than having the package do it for you.

As a photo album, I feel that Digikam is weaker than Picasa and F-Spot. Like Picasa, Digikam respects the folders that your images are already organised in (+1 over F-Spot), but I feel that’s about its only good point. Scrolling performance felt worse than F-Spot, with Picasa the clear winner in performance (even though Picasa isn’t a native port). Digikam’s date view tagged nearly all the images by the time of import, rather than the file’s timestamp on disk. When browsing an album, zooming in and out (to increase/reduce the size of thumbnails shown) is via a toolbar, rather than via a slider. I couldn’t find a slideshow feature, but you can click the ‘Next’ button in the image editor to cycle through the

Digikam does have other things going for it. It’s snappy performance-wise. It’s indisputably a native Linux app, which means that (unlike Picasa) you can use it on arches other than x86. With the growing importance of the amd64 arch, that’s an important consideration. (I’m told that Picasa can’t run on amd64 at all, not even in a 32-bit chroot). Like Picasa (and unlike F-Spot) it hasn’t crashed on me yet. And, unlike Picasa, it has a plugin architecture and a growing range of plugins.

One thing’s for sure. With Digikam in the KDE camp, F-Spot very much a Gnone look-n-feel app, and Picasa in neither camp, Gentoo users have a real choice for managing their family snaps. All three apps have things going for them, and hopefully the authors of all three will be taking the best features from their competitors so that we all benefit in future. Digikam should have the advantage here over Picasa, because it’s not that far off (in some areas it’s already ahead), and in being open source it should be able to grow and improve in ways that Picasa’s closed-source (and WINE-based) reality will hinder. F-Spot’s starting from the back of the grid for me; despite being one of the poster children of the Mono project, I think it has some way to go in the image editing department before it’s competitive.

Me, I’m sticking with Photoshop Elements on Windows for now, and I’ll carry on using Picasa when I need a photo album manager on Linux. But I’ll be keeping an eye on Digikam, and when it can handle RAW files from my Nikon D200, I’ll definitely be having another look at it.

For Luis

I hear you over the native port issue; but the question I keep coming back to is this: F-Spot is written using managed code, which needs its own runtime (Mono) in order to function. How does that make it any more native than Picasa, which relies on WINE?

If it’s the Microsoft connection that makes you unhappy … F-Spot also owes its underlying technological heritage to Microsoft, does it not?

I have no numbers to back this up, but having imported the same image library into both F-Spot and Picasa, I’m much happier with Picasa. I find Picasa performs much faster, doesn’t crash at all (unlike F-Spot, alas), and it allows me to see the folders that I have already organised my image library into. Add to that the better editing toolsm and imho F-Spot has been well and truly knocked off any throne it may have been sitting on up to now.