Organize Holiday Photos with digiKam 1.0

Just in time for the holiday break, and all those holiday photos, the digiKam team has put the finishing touches on the 1.0 release and Kipi-plugins 1.0 as well. digiKam is an image management application for Linux and Windows that allows you to import, organize, edit, enhance, and share your pictures.

The 1.0 release is a major milestone for the project, and includes a slew of new features. One of the major new features in 1.0 is the brand-new batch queue manager that allows users to set up a queue of photos to be run through multiple tools. For instance, you can import bunch of pictures off your camera and set up a batch queue to convert the images to PNG or another format, auto-correct the color, and then rotate the photos. (Handy if you took a lot of pictures with the camera on the side!) Though the tool is still in development, it should prove very handy even in this stage.

Got a new camera for Christmas? With device support for more than 1,100 digital cameras, you should have no problems syncing with digiKam. 1.0 also provides support for OpenStreetMap in the GeoLocation panel for digiKam, interesting rescaling tools, new color filters, and much more. Now you can spend hours enhancing photos of Aunt Erma's lovely hand-knit cat sweaters before using digiKam to upload them to Facebook, Flickr, or other social media sites.

You can also make use of the KDE Image Plugin Interface (Kipi) plugins most recent release with digiKam to further manipulate and edit your photos. The Kipi-Plugins are also compatible with GwenView, KPhotoAlbum, and Showimg.

Source for digiKam 1.0 is available now, and packages for Linux distros should be popping up shortly. Windows builds are also expected soon.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.