digiKam: April 2010 Archives

Now I have a reason to grab onto Ubuntu 10.04 - or any system that includes gThumb 2.11.2.1.

This little image-viewer that could is now even better for anybody who works with JPEG images with embedded captions in IPTC format, which most photographers (and all photojournalists) use for caption and credit information, and which sits with the image in something called the "XML sidecar" (technical term, no?) and which makes my life as a Web editor much, much, much easier.

You know what the GIMP, Krita and almost all "image editing" software in the free and open-source world does to this IPTC/XML data? It cheerfully deletes it when you open and save a JPEG that previously contained it.

Helpful, right?

So people like me have to resort to using non-FOSS apps on non-FOSS platforms - you know Photoshop, and maybe even Photo Mechanic, the app my photographers all use to tag and process images.

No. I won't.

I do use IrfanView, a great image viewer for Windows that's free but not FOSS, and I've even used it in Wine (Bordeaux makes it easy).

Now I really don't need IrfanView, Bordeaux, Wine, Windows, Photoshop ... or GIMP, Krita or anything else.

For basic photo "editing," the two "top" Linux/Unix image-viewers — digiKam with Kipi Plugins (the latter brings the IPTC capability to the app) and gthumb (with a built-in extension that does IPTC) are really the only games in town.

Yes, there's another app - Mapivi - that deals with IPTC, but it's got nowhere near the polish of the KDE and GNOME photo viewers.

Notice I've left out F-Spot. That's because you can do almost nothing with it of a photo-editing nature. Gthumb beats it eight different ways.

Now you might be saying, "Just use digiKam - it's got more features." That is true, digiKam deals with most IPTC fields, does quite a bit of editing, and meets most of my specs.

But a) I'm not crazy about using a KDE app in a mostly-GNOME environment, and the digiKam interface is more than a little cluttered ... and it creates database files that I'm not interested in having on my system.

It does one thing gthumb doesn't do. That is sharpen images. But it's so hard to sharpen an image properly in digiKam - I've never been able to figure it out. They all come out looking horrible. gthumb doesn't sharpen, and truthfully I can live without it.

But gthumb edits the IPTC caption/credit and other data, it crops, it resizes and shrinks file size - that's 98 percent of what I need.

I've used gThumb in Ubuntu 8.04, Debian Lenny and FreeBSD 7.3-release.

The version I'm now running in Ubuntu 10.04 is the best yet - the interface is different (I'm still getting used to it), but the developers' expansion of the "metadata" feature has made it all worth it.

Previously gthumb could only get at the "caption" portion of the IPTC metadata. Now in this new version I can see credit information, tags, time and date — and all sorts of other data, most of which I don't need but a lot of which I definitely do.

In short, gthumb has been my personal "killer app" in Unix/Linux for the past six months, and now it's better by an order of magnitude.

All I need now is "sharpen" capability, and the final piece of my image-editing puzzle will be in place.

It would be great if the GIMP would finally add full IPTC editing capability, but it hasn't happened up to now and probably won't. And yes, if I knew how to do it, I'd code it myself, but I don't (and therefore can't).

But I couldn't be more grateful to the developers of gthumb for making my workflow even better than they've already made it over the past few months.