Digikam windows howto

Other thing that I have not understood are the dates when creating a new album. Are they just for information or can you actually use them for filtering or searching.

How to get started with digiKam for photo management How to use digiKam for photo management. Image by :. Internet Archive Book Images. Modified by Opensource. Get the highlights in your inbox every week. Decisions, decisions. In addition to the Album view, there are: Tags filters the photos in your collection by arbitrary metadata tags. There probably won't be tags at first unless you've created or imported some , but you can create tags in the Tag Manager interface and assign them to pictures.

Clicking on any tag or control-clicking on several tags in the Tag panel filters the thumbnail view to show photos with that tag assigned. The tag manager. Labels filters your photos according to how many stars you've assigned to a photograph. There are other forms of labels, such as color labels and flags, all user-assignable from the thumbnail view. People scans your photo collection for faces. DigiKam recognises faces as faces, and can even take guesses as to their identities an "experimental" feature.

Scanning your entire collection from the start can take a while, but once the initial scan is done, digiKam only scans photos upon import, so be patient on the first use and you won't even notice it happening from then on.

Thumbnail view The thumbnail view is the central panel of digiKam, but its right-click menu provides a host of important features, such as switching to fullscreen mode, assigning tags, and assiging labels, but also file-management functions and access to digiKam's digital darkroom. Comparing photos on the light table.

Editing and effects DigiKam has an built-in editor for most common photo effects and touch-ups. Make pictures better. Edit them. Exporting Getting images out of digiKam, strictly speaking, is automatic, because photos are never "in" digiKam. But wait, there's more! Topics Multimedia Makers column. Art and design. About the author. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time.

He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia. More about me. Recommended reading Gamify your creativity on Linux with Dot Matrix. This option will store more data in the thumbnail database and will use more system memory. These settings permit to customize the tree views of the Left and Right Sidebar. The Tree View icon size option configures the size in pixels of the Tree View icons in digiKam 's sidebars. Use large value for HiDPI screen. The Tree View font option sets the font used to display text in Tree Views.

Instead of opening the image in the editor, the digiKam preview mode F3 will show the image within the main window in the Image Area. The advantage of the preview is that it is faster than opening the image editor and that the icons of the other images remain visible so that you are able to review the list of current images quickly.

Depending on your computer features, you can customize the best way to load images into the preview. Raw files can be processed differently, as this kind of container can require long computation. The first option will try to open a small version of the photograph embedded in the file. Depending on the size of the image, the size of the embedded preview and the size available for the preview on your screen the effect of this option can be visible or not. The second option will always use the full image data for the preview regardless of whether there is a reduced version embedded in the file or not.

This can result in a better quality of the preview but is usually slower. Only if the second option is checked the drop down field to the right of "Raw images:" is accessible. It offers three options: With Automatic selected the Libraw decoder will decode the RAW data automatically without any adjustments from the user. This may lead to weird results sometimes.

The algorithm also takes screen resolution and CPU speed into account to achieve an optimum regarding speed and rendering quality. Raw data in half size will show unprocessed RAW data in half size. The option Preview is zoomed to the original image size is related to the first option. It will zoom the embedded view to the original image size which can lead to a reduced quality of the preview depending on the parameters mentioned above in the description of the first option.

The option Show icons and text over preview will show icons for rotation, face tags, full screen mode, etc. If all three options are activated the only way to leave the Full Screen Mode is the context menu or Ctrl - Shift - F.

You can work on the images also by choosing functions from the context menu of an icon or the preview. To control which types of files digiKam will try to display you can add or remove file extensions from these lists. Any files that are in the digiKam Album folders that do not match these extensions will be ignored by digiKam. The default settings can be easily restored by clicking on the update buttons to the right of each category.

For more information, for example how to remove file types from the list, use the context help with the question mark from the window header. Here you can manage these categories, which is add or remove categories or rename them by using the Replace button. To assign categories to an Album you got to use the Album Properties dialog. This setup page covers all options of information appearing when the mouse hovers over a file icon in the Image Area.

According to the checked options they will be shown or not. See below an example of the information displayed in a tooltip over an icon with the relevant settings done in the configuration page. Image files can have some metadata embedded into the image file format. The Behavior tab allows you to select what information digiKam will write to the metadata and control how digiKam will deal with this embedded information.

If the lazy synchronization is turned on digiKam will only write metadata when user clicks on the Apply pending changes to metadata icon in the status bar or on exit.

Filename for the sidecars set to filename. For example, image1. Please Note: If the box "Read from sidecar files" is checked digiKam will only read the sidecar while ignoring the embedded metadata. It will not actually rotate the image file, only the display of the image on the screen. The image will then be rotated on disk and the tag will be reset to "normal".

If your camera routinely gets this orientation information wrong you might like to switch this feature off. The camera adds an orientation tag to the image's EXIF metadata. If you manually rotate an image, these metadata will be incorrect.

This option will set the orientation tag to "Normal" after an adjustment, assuming that you rotated it to the correct orientation. Switch this off if you don't want digiKam to make changes to the orientation tag, when you rotate or flip the image.

The Advanced tab allows you to manage namespaces used by digiKam to store and retrieve tags, ratings and comments. This functionality is often used by advanced users to synchronize metadata between different software. Please leave the default settings if you are not sure what to do here. The Metadata Templates Manager is meant to create and manage metadata templates which can be used in. The top part shows a list of the already existing templates.

To the right you have three editing buttons, below an input field for the template title. To create a new template you type a title in the input field and click the Add The new template will appear in the list.

To edit an existing template you select it in the list, then you edit its fields see next paragraph and finally you click the Replace You can as well type in a new title for the edited template and save the new version with the Add To delete a template, very obviously, you select it in the list and click the Remove button. Note that all the changes you made to the templates will only be stored in the template file if you exit the settings dialog with OK!

The Add The rest of the window is divided into four tabs, grouping the metadata fields into Rights , Location , Contact and Subjects. The Rights tab see above contains the default identity and copyright data. This is an extract of the IPTC specifications for these fields:. Author is synonymous to Creator and By-line : This field should contain your name, or the name of the person who created the photograph.

If it is not appropriate to add the name of the photographer for example, if the identity of the photographer needs to be protected the name of a company or organization can also be used. Once saved, this field should not be changed by anyone. This field does not support the use of commas or semi-colons as separator. Author title synonymous with By-line title : This field should contain the job title of the photographer. Since this is a qualifier for the Author field, the Author field must also be filled out.

Credit synonymous with Provider : Use the credit field to identify who is providing the photograph. This does not necessarily have to be the author. If a photographer is working for a news agency such as Reuters or the Associated Press, these organizations could be listed here as they are "providing" the image for use by others.

If the image is a stock photograph, then the group agency involved in supplying the image should be listed here. Source : The Source field should be used to identify the original owner or copyright holder of the photograph. The value of this field should never be changed after the information is entered following the image's creation. While not yet enforced by the custom panels, you should consider this to be a "write-once" field.

The source could be an individual, an agency, or a member of an agency. Copyright Notice : The Copyright Notice should contain any necessary copyright notice for claiming the intellectual property, and should identify the current owner s of the copyright for the photograph.

Usually, this would be the photographer, but if the image was done by an employee or as work-for-hire, then the agency or company should be listed. Use the form appropriate to your country. In some foreign countries only the copyright symbol is recognized and the abbreviation does not work.

Furthermore the copyright symbol must be a full circle with a "c" inside; using something like c where the parentheses form a partial circle is not sufficient. For additional protection worldwide, use of the phrase, "all rights reserved" following the notice above is encouraged. In Japan, for maximum protection, the following three items should appear in the copyright field of the IPTC Core: a the word, Copyright; b year of the first publication; and c name of the author.

You may also wish to include the phrase "all rights reserved. The fields in the Location tab are self explaining by their title and the gray hints in the empty fields. If you don't know the code for the subject you want to assign this way is a bit tedious since there are subjects in the standard.

A better way is to look for your subject in this URL. In the diagram you scroll and make additional levels of an item visible by clicking on one of the fields. In the field right of the diagram you can find the code of the selected subject. So you may want to add own subjects, even though they always remain private or company subjects.

You save this custom definition to the template by clicking Add Then you type in a template title if it's a new template and save the template by clicking Add Don't mix up these two! By default the Image Editor will use a black background behind photographs when they are displayed.

If you prefer a different background color you can choose one here. You can also turn off the ToolBar when the Image Editor is in full screen mode. Over and underexposed areas of an image can be indicated by dark and light marker colors that can be defined here.

In the editor this viewing mode can be switched on and off with F10 and F11 respectively. The thresholds for over- and under-exposure can be set by the adjustment bars " Check Indicate exposure as pure color if you want only pure black RGB 0,0,0 indicated as under-exposure and only pure white RGB 8 bit ,, respectively RGB 16 bit , , indicated as over-exposure. Each time a JPEG file is encoded a decision must be made on the level of quality that is to be applied. Unfortunately the level of quality applied is not recorded in the image file.

This means that the Image Editor cannot use the same quality ratio when saving an altered image as was used for the original image. At the time of writing, metadata is supported. Chroma subsampling is the practice of encoding images by implementing more resolution for luminance information than for color information. Please read this Wikipedia article for a full explanation. This operation does not reduce image quality because PNG uses a lossless algorithm.

This will reduce TIFF image files sizes. It has no image quality effect because Deflate is a lossless algorithm. With the LossLess JPEG files option allows for lossless storage, or, if the lossy options is selected, even then the quality for comparative files size is much better than normal JPEG. With the LossLess PGF files option allows for lossless storage, or, if the lossy options is selected, even then the quality for comparative files size is much better than normal JPEG Non-Destructive Editing and Versioning gives you the freedom of editing your images, trying out whatever you want without worrying that you might regret later what you did.

In the checkbox at the top you can enable or disable Non-Destructive Editing and Versioning. In the first field you can choose the file format used for saving the intermediate steps and the final result. Remember that JPEG - like in the screenshot above - is a lossy format. So if you need to start over from an intermediate step it wouldn't be really non-destructive.

Please click the information button on the right side for more detailed information. In the next field you can decide whether the editor will save changes automatically on exit or should ask first. In the third field you decide on which occasions you want the editor to save intermediate steps.

In the early versions of digiKam the Image Editor was just a viewer for photographs, but it is rapidly developing into a very useful photo manipulation tool. Digikam has an easy-to-use interface. It enables you to connect to your camera or preview images. Its layout is very intuitive and easy-to-understand. On the left there are controls to view photos and on the right are there are controls for effects and filters.

As a free image editing software, the latest version of digiKam is quite stable and ready to be installed for your preferred operating system. It is important to note that the first launch of digiKam will be slow performance wise, as digiKam will be analyzing your collection of photos and creating information for it.

This might take a while so it is better to let it run over night if you have a large collection and start using the next day. Now we can move onto image editing with this open source photo editing software. DigiKam has a fairly easy to navigate and understand interface that lets photographers and image editors to get started with their workflow immediately.

Whether you are uploading images directly from your camera, local server or a remote server, digiKam makes organizing and editing digital images pretty straightforward and quick.

One of the main features of digiKam is the Light Table which automatically show improvements that can refine the quality of your digital photos without any loss of quality. Similarly, the image editor of digiKam provides many tools and effects that make editing pretty easy and simple.

DigiKam is a useful, functional, easy to navigate, simple and free image editing software and digital photography workflow manager. It allows you to organize your images and edit them as well. We hope this guide was helpful in giving you a basic understanding of what you can achieve with digiKam as a new or advanced digital photographer. To read more reviews and guides about useful software applications for your photography and image editing adventures keep your eyes out for new topics on containerize.

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