Digikam | An Open Source Digital Photo Management App

DigiKam Free Photo Editing Software

An Open Source Digital Photo Management App

Digikam is an open-source photo management application. It gives maximum transparency, optimal organization of digital photos, and a wide range of plugins.

Overview

If you are looking for an easy to use, powerful digital photo management app to be included in your photography workflow, then DigiKam gets the job done. As an open source application it provides a large number of organizational and editing tools that can help developers and photographers in their day to day photography.

DigiKam is compatible with multiple operating systems including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Similarly, the team developing DigiKam is continuously releasing stable build versions of digiKam to make sure that the photography workflow isn’t affected. With Digikam you can easily import and export raw files, organize your files chronologically through folders and search them up likewise.

What is more, digiKam allows users to export and import their files directly to remote services such as Flickr, Facebook, ImgUr and many more. As an open source digital photo management application digiKam, it has an easy to understand and navigate interface and has an image editor that can be used as a standalone editor which has all the features without the digiKam image database support.

System Requirements


While installing Digikam for Ubuntu make sure you have the following system requirements:

  • Ubuntu 18.04
  • A non-root user with sudo permissions

Features


Some interesting and useful features of DigiKam:

  • Database Support: As an open source digital photo manager and editor, digiKam allows the user to store the image database either locally or on a remote server. It supports multiple databases including SQL, MySQL, and Mariadb.
  • Compatibility with multiple digital camera models: digiKam provides support for multiple digital camera models that are compatible with Gphoto2 and allows you to directly import images from USBs or digital cameras without any issue.
  • Multiple image import functions: while importing images to digiKam users are able to delete images, lock, upload, auto rename, rotate, and convert images from RAW to DNG without any loss of quality.
  • Organize by hierchary: one of the main features of digiKam is how it allows users to arrange their digital photos in folders for easy access. You can also create hierarchies of sub albums within an album, and add tags for fast search.
  • Plugins: digiKam has a whole list of plugins that are used to simplify the use of standalone modules. You can easily disable any of these plugins in the application or create new tools without core implementations. Some of the plugins include: Create Calendar, Print Creator, Create Presentation, Geolocation editor and many more.
  • Image Editor: digiKam’s image editor consists of many editing functions including cropping, rotating, flipping image, exporting image to a different format, color management support, providing 16-bit image color depth support and much more. Features like changing saturation, color space conversion, brightness and contrast adjustment, and other image corrective tools are also available.
  • Queue Manager: as an open source image editor digiKam also provides a batch queue manager to process large number of files in queue and apply operations on multiple images.

Installation


  • Open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:savoury1/digikam
  • Update the system repository
sudo apt update
  • Run following commands in terminal to install digiKam:
sudo apt install digikam

Explore


In this article we have discussed digiKam’s overview and features that makes it a reliable open source image editor application. To learn about other free image editing software applications, please check following links:

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