digiKam, KDE's powerful photo management application, releases version 8.2.0.
This version brings better support for more languages (up to 61 in the works), and an improved version on Windows.
Look forward to automatic tagging based on content analysis and deep-learning. This feature is currently in pre-production.
https://www.digikam.org/news/2023-12-03-8.2.0_release_announcement/
DigiKam has come a long way, but it’s still missing some really basic DAM features. I’d love to stop using Lightroom and there are plenty of good raw converter replacements, but it’s the DAM features that there are no replacement for. In DigiKam an album is a directory on disk. A photo can’t be in two albums at once. They recommend using tags for more groupings, but that just seems clunky.
One of the things I really like about digikam is the matching of the disk layout with the album structure. This makes it really easy to have other programs also interact with my photo library in a way that's near impossible if you instead have an internal photo database.
Tags work great for me for multi-categorization. What feels clunky about them in your workflow? You're even allowed to have a tag hierarchy.
In my workflow tags == keywords which are orthogonal to albums. Keywords describe a photo and get published with the photo. One photo can be in multiple albums like Flickr Photosteam (published to Flickr), “Zion Vacation” (event album, published to Piwigo for friends and family consumption), “2022 Year in Photos” (yearly highlight album), “Favorite Landscapes”. Photos are in a date hierchary on disk.
That make sense. I would use tags like that:
Flickr Published
year roundup/2022
type/Landscapes
type/Portraits
events/trips/Zion 2022
content/food
content/animals
I actually do event level as my on-disk sorting. And then tag for stuff that's not that. But I think it would work pretty well to do the event sorting under tags as well.
Then I rate my favorite photos, usually using the green approved, not stars. But stars would work too. Then if you want to find say, favorite landscapes, the digikam interface makes it really easy to do so.
I'm not sure if you can select what tags get written into the image, but if you can, you might be able to exclude certain parts of the hierarchy, and only include content/ or type/ subhierarchies
I'd be fine with tags in the digiKam DB including all of the above, but the values written to the images IPTC keywords field would have to be limited to the subkeys of what you listed above as type and content hierarchies. Here's an example of one of my images: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tcgoetz/53265234720 you can see what I use for keywords in the info below the image.
My workflow also includes grouping similar images, using compare to grade them best to worst, marking the best with the pick flag, and rejecting the worst. I also group subimages of panoramics with the generated panoramic as the top of the stack and the pick image. didKam has a group feature but it seems different. Grouping in LR hides members of the group other than the pick image.
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