
Digikam 7.0: Open-source photo management - ekianjo
https://www.digikam.org/news/2020-07-19-7.0.0_release_announcement/
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est31
I checked out Digikam recently because my camera didn't support PTP but
instead a custom protocol and I wanted to copy pictures over (Dolphin had no
support). Sadly, Digikam had to mess with the metadata of each picture and put
its name inside. Which contribution has the program done other than download
the picture from the camera? So I went to using an SD card reader instead.

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cortesoft
Since this is an open source project, could you remove that part of the code?

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tokai
You can configure what is added to the metadata in the settings.

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mceachen
It's a dubious default, though. Why muck with tags from originals when you
don't have to?

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lakeWater
Not really a default. When you start up Digikam for the first time a prompt
asks if you would like information saved to the files or not. If you select no
information is stored in a local Digikam DB.

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aorth
Can confirm: just installed digikam 7.0 and it asked me if I want to store
information in photo metadata. I said no...

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tobtoh
I wish there was photo management software which catered to non-enterprise
multi-user environments.

ie families, or small organizations where the photos (and database) would
reside on a computer, but other users on their computers could access it via
the local network.

At the moment, this middle ground doesn't seem to exist. It's either single-
user only photo management software or full-blown multi-user digital asset
management software with enterprise-level pricing.

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mceachen
PhotoStructure is absolutely designed for self-hosted family-and-friends
access of local photos and videos. You'll get installation instructions
emailed to you shortly after you subscribe to the beta.
[https://PhotoStructure.com](https://PhotoStructure.com)

(Disclaimer: I'm the author, and wished the same thing you did, so I quit my
job to build it).

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alexktz
Any chance the website could show a screenshot or something? It’s just a
generic thing right now and I have no interest in signing up to something I
can’t see.

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mceachen
Sure, I'll add some more prominently.

[https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/](https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/)
has several.

I added one on the home page, too.

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virtualmic
Sorry for somewhat unrelated query: is Digikam a replacement for Darktable? If
not what's a good workflow between the two? I am a hobbyist photo taker and
have only recently started using Darktable and really enjoy using it. However,
it isn't a very efficient photo manager in my opinion (I may very well be
missing something).

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black_puppydog
I would say they're complementary. Digikam is more of an all-around organizer
and has lots of import/export stuff, tagging, and now good face recognition
too apparently (the old one was based on classic Haar cascades).

Darktable is for selecting a series of shots, going through them, developing
the ones you want to keep.

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MR4D
Which would you use to replace Picasa (on a Mac) ?

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morsch
Darktable's targets digital photography enthusiasts or professionals. The
learning curve is steep. Picasa's target demographic was "everyone". So
probably Digikam.

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distances
I can confirm. Every now and then I want to edit some of my photos and run
Darktable, only then to remember it has zero automation and a hundred of
sliders for individual adjustments. It definitely requires dedication to use,
more of that than I have to give for holiday photo editing.

~~~
morsch
You can get by using the same 5 sliders for almost all your photos. The other
sliders remain available for edge cases or when you want to go the extra mile.

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blendergeek
I haven't tried this out yet, but from the release notes it sounds like the
new facial recognition system will be better than I am. I am not good at
recognizing faces and have been waiting for quite some time for a good open
source tool to recognize faces with.

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agumonkey
Never thought of people with facial agnosia.. someone make an app !

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blendergeek
According to Wikipedia it is called prosopagnosia [1]. I have never been
formally diagnosed, but I cannot even recognize the faces of my own family
members to save my life. Having software that sorts faces will be great. Given
that I only use open source software, I am quite excited for this new release.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia)

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takeda
> I have never been formally diagnosed, but I cannot even recognize the faces
> of my own family members to save my life.

And I thought I had this disease. I think root of my issue most likely is that
my brain is assuming that most people I see on the street or during parties I
will never see again so it immediately forgets faces and names and only starts
remembering when I encounter them few times.

I would imagine the most famous people who were diagnosed with prosopagnosia
probably have something closer to what I have than you.

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StavrosK
But not recognizing faces of people you see at parties is different from not
recognizing your own family. Do you have the latter too?

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takeda
LOL, after editing the comment I cut out the important part. What I meant to
say is that I thought I had that disease, but after reading the comment I
doubt I have it.

I also suspect that many celebrities who claim that they have it probably just
have a bad memory. They are normally meeting a lot of people so it's not easy
to remember faces.

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BugWatch
Sadly, even at version 7.0, it (Digikam) still doesn't support virtual
albums/collections, and it insists on direct album-file_system_directory
correlation. Unfortunently, it is useless to me as an image/photo organizer.
(I don't really see tags as a substitute).

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tmp538394722
Can you help me understand what you’re looking for in a “virtual album”
feature that isn’t achieved by tags?

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pmcjones
Being able to specific a particular sequence for the photos in a "virtual
album" that is different than, say, their capture date or filename.

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jhoechtl
KDE software is so great (digiKam, Kdenlive, Kate, Krita) unfortunately the
KDE environment compared to Gnome is just so bug-ridden, especially when it
comes to multi-monitoring, wayland-support and scaling. Gnome shines in these
respecst. I wish thebest of both worlds!

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brnt
I don't really have problems with multi monitor and KDE.

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berkut
I do - every time I unlock my screen, Plasma crashes, and my windows get
randomly distributed around my virtual desktops.

Oddly enough, if I only have one monitor enabled, it doesn't happen. And yes,
I've nuked my preferences several times.

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talhcknews
I have the same problem consistently on PopOS which uses GNOME just across two
monitors. As a bonus, in the redistribution process, windows are randomly
resized to a lot larger sizes. I suspect this is related to me leveraging the
experimental scaling features in GNOME which is hard to avoid using 27inch 4K
monitors. Really wish the window management would be more polished but I have
no skill in that domain to make it better.

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techntoke
I'm currently using Google Photos for facial recognition, however since they
broke their Google Drive integration I'd like to move away from it. For now I
am using a combination of Syncthing, the Google Photos interface and rclone.

Is there an API or potential to use this in headless for integration in other
apps such as web or Android? What about the automated cards and animations
that Google Photos creates? Is there anything like that for Digikam or another
app that can be self-hosted?

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stalker314
Nextcloud is self-hosted solution and there is plugin for it that allows you
to recognize and cluster faces (to persons) using DLib:
[https://github.com/matiasdelellis/facerecognition](https://github.com/matiasdelellis/facerecognition).
This might be close to what you need (while Nextcloud is huge software on its
own, it is not best photo management app)

~~~
techntoke
Thanks.

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aidenn0
Is it possible to get digikam to store files in a simple date based directory
structure? I really wanted to like digikam, but ended up using rapid-photo-
downloader instead because it was so easy to setup that way, and it keeps me
from being too locked in to software that might go away.

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morsch
Can I attach the face-tags to the RAW file (or the XMP, I guess) and use them
in other applications, specifically darktable?

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Youden
Yes but you need to configure Digikam to write metadata in its settings.
Should be able to write to either EXIF or XMP.

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dreamcompiler
I'm happy to hear this and hope it works. Apple's iPhoto used to do good face
recognition but as soon as you exported photos the information was lost. I
hope this can store the face rectangles and their IDs in the photo's metadata.

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canada_dry
Bah! I was really hoping Digikam's face recognition was going to work _at
least as well_ as the 10+ yr old Picassa that I'm trying to replace... but I'm
not having any luck - pretty disappointing matching. Even with dozens of
images manually identified it is failing to match the same person correctly in
other pictures.

Plus, the interface is confusing and not very efficient (in aiding the
matching/identification process).

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BlackLotus89
Then you will be happy to know that they are working on exactly those problems
right now (see the article part and look for summer of code).

> As you can see, work is advancing very well and we expect to publish new
> code later this summer, probably for digiKam 7.2.0 when all implementations
> will be tested and ready for production.

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sergiotapia
Are the people tags saved to the photo's file metadata somehow? I've thrown
about 130,000 photos up to google photos for safe-keeping but want a second
set of redundancy.

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mceachen
No. I'd love to be wrong, btw: please correct me if I'm wrong.

(I've looked at the sidecars from takeout, and the API). You might be able to
scrape the metadata via puppeteer, but that's brittle and janktastic.

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pmcjones
If you use the Album>Write Metadata to Files command, it will do so. (I just
tested adding a Face Tag to a photo. In Settings>Configure>Metadata, I also
checked the box next to Face Tags under Write This Information to the
Metadata. This latter action didn't seem to be enough by itself.)

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mceachen
Ah, sorry: I was talking about Google Photos, not Digikam. I haven't played
with Digikam's metadata handling much, so thanks for that tip.

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pmcjones
Oops -- my apologies; I wasn't correctly following the discussion.

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tempodox
It would be nice if it could display UTF-8 text. Apparently it only uses ISO
8859-1.

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skoskie
The linked post specifically says it supports UTF-8. Might double check the
settings.

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schoolornot
The macOS version is distributed as a .pkg and isn't signed or notarized.
That's a no-go for me. Any reason why they don't just ship a .app in a disk
image?

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the_why_of_y
Most likely because nobody on the development team has the time to keep up
with Apple's treadmill of ever changing Gatekeeper requirements. If you're
knowledgeable about such matters, see it as your chance to contribute.

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notyourday
Every year for at least last 5 years I have been trying Digikam. Every year
like 99.9% of the reasonably complicated GUI-based single process multi-
functional software written on Linux it would blow up while working with
marginally large sets of files (~ 50k photos, roughly evenly split between 24
megapixel NEF files and random resolution jpegs )

It is just sad to see that the imaging/image processing/image organizing world
is still stuck in 1990s paradigm rather than embrace that the computers have
gobs of memory, a single application can be composed of dozen of individual
components talking to each other over 127.0.0.1 and background jobs is a
thing.

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laythea
We are working on a multi-process GPU accelerated image viewer with the
ability to seamlessly browse and organise through hundreds of thousands of
photos. Although it is multi process, all applications are embedded in a
container application. The processes communicate using 127.0.0.1. All done
locally.

It was specifically designed to handles hundreds of thousands of images and is
in the final stages of release.

We have a little bit more information and screenshots on the website:
[https://www.pixolage.com](https://www.pixolage.com) and would be grateful for
any community feedback (or beta testers!).

Disclaimer: I work at Pixolage

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gsich
Picasa can do it on a mediocre CPU, single threaded. That's the benchmark you
should aim at.

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laythea
Performance is great on single thread/single CPU, but performance is even
better when doing multi-threaded for most scenarios.

In terms of development, we prefer developing on lesser hardware so that we
can be sure that Pixolage will run super smooth for most setups (although long
compile waits can be frustrating).

For scalability, nothing beats _multi-process_. (Due to the way the OS manages
communications between GPU driver<->process using the GPU).

Completely agree - Picasa is/was a great application!

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andialo
How reliable is the face recognition in 7.0? In older versions it was not as
good as closed source software like picasa.

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chris_st
See the "Deep-Learning Powered Faces Management" section of the linked
document for a lot more information. Specifically, they mention that they
replaced the old (OpenCV) algorithm with a new neural-net based one.

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indymike
Digikam has always been a gem. This sounds like a great improvement.

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gsich
Maybe they have now what Picasa did 7 years ago.

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pbhjpbhj
This comment seems mean, perhaps. But, Picasa's facial recognition was far
better than Digikam's and I marveled at how Picasa could do so quickly, so
long ago, what Digikam has failed to do (until now?).

I've been a Digikam user for a long time now, it's really useful for me, but
the whole face-tagging system has been really poor for a long time IMO (eg all
faces recognised in one image as same person; all tags recognised as being the
last person manually tagged).

It's one thing I'd love to have donated to a bounty on as it saves a lot of
time to have working tagging.

I wonder if there are plans to add other types of tagging, object recognition
or what-have-you.

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StavrosK
I think that comment is more "Picasa was amazing" than "Digikam is bad", and
it's right, Picasa _was_ amazing. Hopefully Digikam will reach those levels
soon.

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gsich
It was. I have searched long for a similar program (mainly face recognition)
and couldn't find one. Github is full of POC for that, but nothing in a
"complete" package.

I tried Digikam, but their face eh recognition discovered also lots of non-
faces. The UI also was not fun to use. You click on a suggestion and it takes
several seconds before you could type either the name, or pick one. All that
with a relatively small collection (2TB).

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StavrosK
I, too, am currently discovering that it is a bit too slow. Too bad, I would
very much like a Picasa replacement.

