In quest of a photo management application
Yesterday evening, I was cleaning the mess in some of my most populated directories
(recup/, downloads/ and sandbox/), which, by deleting some unuseful files (what the
hell have I kept a 700 MB livecd.iso ?) and moving some others, helped me grow
the free space on /home from 115 MB to 6.3GB.
Then I started looking at photos/, where I store every each picture I’ve taken with
the camera my parents and my sister offered me, last Christmas, a Nikon Coolpix
5600.
This directory is 10 GB heavy, and as I was talking with Clenche, on IRC
(#openbsd.fr @ FreeNode), he asked us what software we used to handle and sort
our pictures albums.
So I started telling him I would like an application to tag my albums, reorder them,
manipulate a bit the images and stuff (yes, something like Picasa, which doesn’t
run under OpenBSD, even with the Linux binary compatibility activated).
Browsing the Internet, I found digiKam (to shorten all the trolls, yes it has a K
as in KDE).
Download latest stable source, bunzip2, tar, cd digikam-0.9.0-beta2, more README.
Damn, dependencies are a PITA !
– DEPENDENCIES ——————————————————-
AutoConf >= 2.5.x http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf
AutoMake >= 1.7.x http://www.gnu.org/software/automake
KDE >= 3.x (>=3.5.x recommended) http://www.kde.org
sqlite >= 3.x http://www.sqlite.org
dcraw >= 8.x (>=8.30 recommended) http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw
exiv2 >= 0.9.x http://www.exiv2.org
libgphoto2 >= 2.x (>=2.2.x recommended) http://www.gphoto.org
libkipi >= 0.1 http://extragear.kde.org/apps/kipi
liblcms >= 1.14.x http://www.littlecms.com
libtiff >= 3.6.x (>=3.8.2 recommended) http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff
libpng >= 1.2.x http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html
On Tuesday, 00:07 am, I didn’t want to deal with this… but instead of giving up,
I took a look at the packages.
Great, it exists !
Of course, it’s an old version (0.7.2) but it will help me test it.
[root@september i386]pkg_add digikam-0.7.2.tgz
digikam-0.7.2:gdbm-1.8.3p0: complete
digikam-0.7.2:libgphoto-2.1.5: complete
ddigikam-0.7.2:libkexif-0.2.1: complete
digikam-0.7.2:libkipi-0.1.1: complete
digikam-0.7.2: complete
I love OpenBSD <3
At first launch, it asks you where to store the albums, then it starts.
The interface is clean, but what I quickly noticed is that Album -> Export and
Tools -> Batch Processing are empty.
One pkg_add later…
[root@september i386]pkg_add digikamimageplugins-0.7.2.tgz
digikamimageplugins-0.7.2: complete
The above menus still aren’t filled 
Playing with it for five minutes, it seems to be very slow, particularly in menus,
but it does its job, and I’ll give it a try for some time, to see if it fits my needs
(at the moment, I can’t make an exhaustive list of them).
If you use a better application for photo management, let me know !