photo management tools
I'm on the search for a good photo management tool. (I imagine this
might become a frequently-started-thread on this list.)
I have both JPEGs and RAW files (CR2). Usually I have both, using
JPEG+RAW mode on the camera. I would particularly like it if the tool
could treat these as a group rather than individual images. I don't want
to see every image twice, and if I move an image I want to move both
formats.
I usually just use the JPEG, but occasionally want to use the CR2
which would later be saved to an XCF, TIFF, PNG etc.
I have not found this ability in any of the tools yet. Alternatively
with a good enough tool I could just use the RAWs. That probably needs
Lightroom/Aperture level functionality to be practical though.
I like albums (including hierarchy), and I would like the albums and
directory structure on disk to match.
F-Spot does not have albums. It appears to want to have a pool of images
(with directories organised by date) and then use tags for all grouping.
The workflow doesn't work for me.
Digikam looks like the best bet, as I like its album/directory handling.
The raw thumbnail generation seems quite slow and it doesn't appear to
have any grouping ability as I discussed. It has Flickr upload. I
haven't yet tried any metadata editing (eg captioning) - I believe there
are plugins for it to write these out to the image files? I don't want
the data to be locked up in its database.
Picasa is generally good, although it doesn't handle hierarchy in the
directory structure very well (you can't drag directories around). The
2.7 beta has lots of UI bugs. It doesn't do any grouping, and it can
only upload to PicasaWeb of course. It does write captions etc out to
file, although it likes to lock some information up in its database.
And it's non-free.
cheers,
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
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