Upcoming: Photo Management Software Review
I am planning to review photo management software for Linux very soon. I have made a list of applications that I plan to try, but I wanted to know what applications you wanted my to try out.
Current List:
- Picasa
- F-Spot
- Gwenview
- Lphoto
- digiKam
- blueMarine
- KoffeePhoto
- jBrout
If you know of other good photo management software, please leave a comment.
March 1st, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Just as people make a distinction between an editor, a work processor and a desktop publishing system, so some distinction
needs to be made in photo management.
Before I would call a program a PMS I would ask:
1. Does it scale gracefully? Even a personal photo collection
can easily get to 100,000 pix in a few years.
2. Does it handle offline media? Can it CREATE offline media?
Can it keep thumbnails of offline media online so you don’t have
to keep shuffling disks?
3. Can in use ITPC and EXIF meta data encoded in the images?
4. Can it it repurpose ITPC and EXIF fields for your own use?
5. Is it easy to assign keywords, tags, descriptions?
6. Can you bulk tag images? Can you bulk tag fields that don’t
currently have an entry. (E.g where you haven’t entered a
specifric description for your trip to mexico, can you:
masstag path/to/mex/trip “default desc = “2007 Mexico Trip”
7. Does the program have a graceful way to deal with other programs that don’t honor exif and iptc fields? (Photoshop)
8. Does the program have a way to deal with derivations.
If I copy foo and crop it for publication, can the management program track that foo2 is derived from foo, and hence will share most of the metadata.
9. Does the program cope with external programs that move
images within the file tree?
10. Can the program recover from database corruption?
11. Does it handle most of the available image formats including
camera raw files.
12. Can it use multiple folders for repositories so that you aren’t limited to a single disk?
13. Can it work with multiple users?
14. Can rights be delegated at a fine scale: A top end PMS
should be able to have a rights scheme such as:
Adminstrator: Has all rights.
Uploader: Can enter images into the database.
Owner: Has all rights to a set of images.
Editor: Can modify the image.
MetaEd: Can modify the metadata.
Copier: Can make a copy of the image outside the database.
Viewer: Can look at the image.
None: Has no access.
This scheme should be setable so that rights are granted on a folder/class of images basis.
Thus, if I’m the advisor for a school yearbook, I can grant
Uploader status to the Mike, Susan, and John, who are the photographers.
They will automatically be owners of the files. They, or myself
as administrator can grant meta-data of the Basketball game to
Greg, who’s the sports editor, and Copy+Edit to the layout crew
to make copies, and crop them.