A Comparison of Linux Photo Managers

Written by: Pranav Thadeshwar • Edited by: Lamar Stonecypher
Updated Dec 11, 2009 • Related Guides: Digikam | Linux

Want to organize your photo's in Linux to manage those vacation snaps and celebrations? If you have lots of pictures to choose from, you're going to have a hard time trying to find the exact photographs you have in mind. Here is where this list of best Linux photo album apps will help.

Next up: F-Spot ►

Introduction

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With the amount of cheap storage growing, people are more likely to store more media. Home-videos and photographs are a priceless treasure for any family. Photographers have bigger capacity cameras which capture and save more photographs in every outing. And with growing storage sizes, people are saving more and more on their hard disks. Of course, with this massive increase in the quantity of media, it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain and tag it all properly. Here is where a photo-manager comes in.

These are considered the best Linux photo albums, that will scan your drives and make a list of all the photos on your computer. They will then organize them in a bunch of different ways depending on how you want them. A few photo managers will go that extra mile and bundle in a photo-editor which saves you from the hassle of opening your images in an image editor just to give it a few touches. But well, this is just a simple explanation of a photo manager/album's job. Each and every application available today has its pros and cons and is suited to different demographics and purposes. I'll go through a few of them which are some of the best available today.

F-Spot

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F-Spot is one of the most feature-filled photo manager/album out there today. And it's free! Some of the features included in the latest version are the ability to work with 16 different types of images, importing from hard drives, cameras, or iPods, tagging, searching, grouping, and full screen and slideshow modes. F-Spot also supports viewing and exporting EXIF and XMP metadata in your images.

Is that all? No, far from it actually. F-Spot also has a built-in photo editor which allows you to do basic tasks like cropping, resizing and rotating images. You can also do color adjustments to your images like changing contrast, brightness, hue, saturation and temperature. The icing on the cake is in the form of various ways to export your photos. You can burn them to a CD from within the application itself, or upload your images to one of the many media-uploading websites (Flickr, 23, Picasa Web, SmugMug). If you have your own website running a content-management system like Gallery or O.r.i.g.i.n.a.l., F-Spot will support that too!

F-Spot can also be extended using extensions which can be downloaded off F-Spot's site.

Picasa

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Another amazing photo manager/album software is Picasa by Google. Although it's the Windows version which has been ported to Linux by Google, it does an amazing job of helping you manage your photos, and bundles in a slick interface and a simple photo editor with it. Picasa supports 8 different file formats including videos. While the feature-set is comparable to that of F-Spot's a number of features are unavailable or buggy in the Linux version of Picasa. My recommendation? Skip this one.

DigiKam

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While F-Spot and Picasa scratch that itch pretty well, DigiKam manages to scratch the itch and swat the mosquito in one swoop. Although a couple of limitations are annoying (like having to copy all images to its folder), DigiKam excels at the job it's supposed to do. It has more features than the above two photo managers, with the ability to blur, sharpen, and invert colors, and red-eye correction. Something which you'll find incredibly useful is the fact that DigiKam uses an SQLite database to keep track of all your content, speeding up operations.

More features are offered through KIPI (KDE Image Plugins Interface), and it is the only photo manager in Linux that can handle 16bit/channel images. New features like a GPS locator, iPod support, RAW image support, and advanced metadata editing are routinely added through the aforementioned plugins interface.

To top it all off, DigiKam has won various awards including the 2008 Readers' Choice Award for Favorite Digital Photo Management tool. To shorten all this into one sentence, I'd say "Go for DigiKam!"

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Soderstrom Jun 5, 2010 3:04 PM

RE RE: A Comparison of Linux Photo Managers

Also to point out for Picasa is that Google stopped giving support for a Linux version so it's still at version 3 while the one for windows and mac is version 3.5 that also have other great features like keeping original jpeg quality when upload. I chooses to try out Digikam instead after erading this article and think it will do the work I need it for :)

Bryan Feb 11, 2010 6:00 AM

digiKam

Pranav

I wanted to use an external drive to store all our photos in one place - surely I CAN'T be the only person needing to do this! I was going crazy trying to synchronise our PCs running ubuntu and using Picasa (it cannot be done, Picasa is not designed that way). I found that digiKam was the only full featured photo-manager that simply allowed me to place the photo data and its database on the shared drive. Also I really disliked the way that F-spot gratuitously ignored any existing file structure and created its own. The fact that lots of photos from older cameras have garbage dates on them due to battery removal or lazyness in re-setting the date. I own that digiKam is not as intuitive as Picasa, and tha the searching functions are confusing to those not comfortable with boolean logic and the way that it ORs the result of 3 search criteria from different places on the screen! But with effort it is possible to operate effectively at a simpler level for naive users - provided they don't experiment too much!

Good discussion...

Claudio Feb 5, 2010 10:58 AM

Digikam

Pranav,
There is no need to copy your images in Digikam's folder. I know. I have 70,000 pictures, and I would NOT appreciate having them duplicated in my system.

This is actually one of the good points of Digilkam compared to others photo workflow applications for Linux, since several of them depend on importing pictures in their dirs.

Jared Dec 18, 2009 10:45 AM

DigiKam is cross platform

Never used it, just researching options today.

Thanks for the post.

Mark Jun 26, 2009 8:33 AM

RE: A Comparison of Linux Photo Managers

Picasa is cross-platform, one very big feature not offered by others as far as I know.
Also it's extremely fast and in my case it's not buggy at all.
A shame the handling of video's is not supported in the Linux-version, it's the one thing I'm missing and because of this I'm currently looking for an alternative..

Nice post, well done.

A Comparison of Linux Photo Managers

Introduction

F-Spot

Picasa

DigiKam

Comments