Ubuntu Photo Manager Experiment
July 7th, 2008
I have a passion for photography and have become heavily entrenched in the tools available on Mac OS X, such as Aperture and Photoshop. This experiment focuses mainly on Aperture and what tools, if any, exist for Ubuntu to replace my Aperture workflow with something cross-platform and open-source that I can use on Mac OS X and Ubuntu.
Hypothesis:
Aperture will reign supreme and continue to be my default photo manager and raw photo editor after trying the Ubuntu Linux photo management alternatives. Honestly, I do not see how free and open source solutions can compete with Aperture.
Experiment:
I am heavily invested in Apple’s Aperture photo editor manager. Given Apple’s attention to detail, and the Core technologies available from the Mac OS, I had sincere doubts anything could stack up in the Linux world. But, I have been surprised many a time, especially by Ubuntu itself; I was looking forward to seeing what the open source world had to offer.
With this experiment I set out to learn:
- Can I edit raw photos in Ubuntu?
- Is there a capable photo manager that compares to Aperture?
- And, if the above questions are answered positively, can I get my photos out of Aperture’s proprietary and platform specific database and start managing with them in a workflow compatible with both OS X and Ubuntu Linux?
F-Spot
The default photo editor that comes with Ubuntu 8.04, called F-Spot, was quickly discarded. It is too similar to iPhoto and lacks many of the more professional features that I have grown accustomed to in Aperture. Further more it had an annoying bug that causes any photo I crop to show up without a thumbnail when the application is re-opened. F-Spot is unable to work with the cropped files it created.
Picasa
Google’s Picas intrigues me. I really like the application overall. It is so intuitive. I found everything exactly where I expected it. And Picasa can work with raw photos. But it does not allow for custom aspect ratio’s when cropping a photo. I crop all my photos to the golden ratio of 1.62:1, so this limitation is unacceptable.
LightZone
After trying the two most obvious apps I continued to search for my Aperture replacement. I found this great site for finding linux apps, and it had a list of linux photo editors. This list lead me to LightZone, a cross-platform (Macintosh, Windows, and Linux) photo editor that is very similar to both Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom. It is probably a bit closer to Lightroom in its layout. The only drawback here is the application costs $200 and is not open source 
LightZone is certainly slower than Aperture, especially when zoomed in 1:1 on the photo. But I must give it this: it browses the local file system and does not have any proprietary database that it locks its users into. I am a bit disappointed that there is no online support forum. As a few readers noted there is a LightZone help forum.
Bibble
I was pleased to find others promising applications as well. Bibble 4 is very fast and it only costs $130. I like that it comes with Noise Ninja built in. Noise reduction tools are one area where all raw processors, including Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom, are really lacking. Here is a screen shot of the up-and-coming Bibble 5 which has a more polished interface than the current version 4.
Bibble 4 does not win out aesthetically, but it appears that Bibble 5 fixes that. But version 4 is fast and has many nice tools for editing not just raw photos, but just about any file format from jpegs to gifs to tiffs.
It does not however have any photo-management capabilities. No tagging, project management, or meta data editing. I wish its .bib file that it stores next to each image to track its changes was a hidden file.
Raw Therapee
The best find of all: Raw Therapee. Another raw photo processor, but this raw processor is free 
It does not, however, run on Mac OS X
When compared to Aperture this app does have a few drawbacks. Similar to Bibble it is only a raw processor and does not manage projects. And it does not work with anything but raw photos, so it will not allow for processing jpegs or tiffs (however it will output your raw photos to the jpeg, png, or tiff format.) Reader smably commented below that Raw Therapee does work on jpgs and tiffs. This might be true but I have yet to get it to open one—it only opens raw files for me.
On the plus side Raw Therapee is free, quite capable, has an active forum of users, and even comes with curves adjustments, something that Aperture users have been clamoring for and have yet to receive from Apple. While it does now work with formats other than raw, it will at least allow for metadata editing of the raw files, even allowing for the recording of additional tags.
Qtpfsgui
Here is another useful application I found. While it certainly could use a new name, Qtpfsgui is an HDR tool for Ubuntu Linux, Macintosh, and Windows.
The result:
I am quite shocked by this, but the answers to all 3 of my initial questions is yes. There isn’t an all-in-one package that will do the trick, but by combining Ubuntu’s file manager Nautilus for project management, Raw Therapee for raw processing, and the Gimp for non-raw processing, just about everything I do in Aperture can be done on Ubuntu Linux using free and open source solutions.
Specific to question #3, Aperture 2 now allows for photos to be stored externally, outside of its database. I can migrate my images out of the Aperture database and into an external folder structure that I can then work with in Ubuntu. More testing is required, but I believe I can continue to use Aperture on OS X and these other apps on Ubuntu with relative ease and compatibility. I will write more as I further test this new system.
The next step:
First I will migrate all my photos out of Apertures database and into a more flexible folder structure that is available to both Mac OS X and Ubuntu. Currently I do not have a hard drive that has both read and write access to my Mac and Ubuntu, so I will have to figure that one out as well.
Then I test out the workflow in Ubuntu. I am still curious about color management in linux, as well as panorama stitching. I do alot of panorama work and currently use Photoshop to automatically stitch them together. But that is a large enough project to warrant its own experiment. Look for that one in the near future.
The one thing I am currently lacking, on both OS X and Ubuntu, is a decent metadata editor that will add any and all metadata to the image itself. I do not like how Aperture separates this data into its own proprietary database. Ideally I want a cross-platform tool that will edit the IPTC, XMP, and EXIF data. So my next task is to find a decent metadata editor. Know of any?
95 Responses to “Ubuntu Photo Manager Experiment”
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July 8th, 2008 at 1:46 am
You may want to check into Rawstudio. It is an open source application that does run on Linux. I am not sure if it is available in the default Ubuntu apt repositories. From just a bit of basic testing with it, the software was very easy to work with and provided a lot of features.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:46 am
Nice review! I did not know about Raw Therapee, so I’ll give it a try today. From a list I’m missing DigiKam and Krita. DigiKam is more than suitable for managing, tagging, etc., while Krita is an alternative to Gimp/Photoshop until Gimp starts to work with 16 bit depth.
Check my review on Linux Raw Photo Processing.
Note: Bibble is good in IPTC, EXIF, …
Cheers,
L.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I support Linux 100% but I feel that people should make their own decision after reading the literature at PromotingLinux.com.
I will admit that color management is not quite ready under Ubuntu and Linux in general, like it is under Vista. There have been huge improvements over XP.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
I primarily work in Linux and use Digikam to store and organize (tags, ratings) my photos. I copy them on the Mac where my wife likes to view them with iPhoto.
Digikam tags translate to iPhoto keywords because that information is stored in the IPTC metadata. We can create Smart Albums in iPhoto based on those tags.
I do not organize by putting things in folders, only by tags.
I have been looking to find a way to sync ratings from Digikam to iPhoto.
July 8th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
For panorama stitching, try Hugin.
July 9th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
To edit Metadata, and file your photos automatically on the basis of this metadata, try exiftools. Windoze, Mac and Linux versions available.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:30 am
You can use digikam as your photo management tool and your editor for working on files after you convert them from raw. Digikam comes with dcraw plugin, but it’s very, very limited for raw photos. install digikam and kipi-plugins and you have a very feature-rich photo management and editing tool for jpeg files. i have ufraw plugin for gimp and rawtherapee on my machine right now, and you can open a raw file from within digikam by right-clicking on the photo and choosing Open With and open it with gimp or rawtherapee, thereby being able to use the raw tool of your choice while inside the photo management of digikam, works sweet.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:41 am
i looked at the promotinglinux.com website – hilarious. one of the best joke sites i’ve seen in a long time.
July 10th, 2008 at 11:49 am
This is a good read indeed.
Anyone interested in Linux raw processors might want to also check out these articles. They also discuss various raw processing software packages for Linux:
http://www.anthonymartinez.org/wordpress/?p=141
http://jcornuz.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/raw-develo …
http://lorand.somogyi.name/2008/06/raw-photo-proce …
I had no idea the world of Linux had so many options for working with raw photos!
July 10th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Try using Wine (http://www.winehq.org/) to run Photoshop on Ubuntu. CS3 is not currently well supported, but CS2 has Gold Level status, meaning with some slight config tweaks, it should run flawlessly. Check http://appdb.winehq.org/ for more application compatibility.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
You should not only test gnome application. often, kde applications are supperior. Try digikam and krita, you will like it
July 10th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/
Nice app that has good geotagging support. I have never used it with RAW images
Also, Gqview has been recently forked (developer MIA) to make geeqie – which is developing fast and could be a really great alternative
July 10th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Have you taken a poke at Blue Marine?
It’s still in development, but aims squarely to be an open source alternative to Aperture and Lightroom -
http://bluemarine.tidalwave.it/
-jj
July 10th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
1. Picasa for Linux does allow arbitrary crops.
2. You constantly confuse the capabilities of Ubutnu with those of Linux in general. None of the above is particular or special to Ubuntu.
3. You overlook Ufraw which provides all the vital preprocessing you need before using Gimp or Krita.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
As a Linux developer (http://gobolinux.com), and for a while a professional photographer, I found none open source alternatives that give me the same productive environment as Adobe’s Lightroom + Photoshop.
Event though I started with GIMP (and I still love it), it’s interface sometimes stands on my way, and it does not have some very useful tools and filters.
You can mimic then quite easily, but if I spent 30 seconds more time on each of the 600 pictures from a wedding, it’ll mean that I have to work 5 hours more than with Photoshop.
If only I had time to help the development of GIMP and RAW Studio, I’d get a great open source platform for my photography work.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
LightZone does have online support forums. Check here:
http://www.lightcrafts.com/support/forums/index.html
July 10th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Rawstudio (http://rawstudio.org)
Gimp RAW plugins: ufraw (http://ufraw.sourceforge.net) and cdraw (http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw)
And another +1 for Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net)
July 10th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
> Honestly, I do not see how free and open source solutions can compete with Aperture.
Why, of course not. That would fly in the face of dogmatic Apple superiority, wouldn’t it. Glad you took the time to investigate, but the attitude is telling.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Raw Therapee does allow processing of JPGs and TIFFs. I’m not sure why your review says it doesn’t.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I’ve used linux for many years, and actually did some development on f-spot about a year ago before I bought a macbook pro.
If you can use nautilus to replace the photo management capabilities of aperture – then I don’t think you are making anywhere near full use of apertures functionality. I make very heavy use of the keyword and rating features, and regularly build ’smart albums’ that will do things like bring together all of my 3 star or better photos that include butterflies. I’m pretty sure nautilus can’t do that, and I’m positive that it doesn’t support Aperture’s ‘offline’ mode – where it saves a screen-resolution preview locally, but puts the full raw image on an external drive.
Unfortunately one of the reasons I switched from linux to mac for my main machine was that there was nothing on linux that begins to touch the capability and ease of use of Aperture.
F-spot is the closest – but it still lacks in many regards, and I finally decided I’d rather be spending my time working on my photography, rather than working on photo management software.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
“I support Linux 100% but I feel that people should make their own decision after reading the literature at PromotingLinux.com(http://www.promotinglinux.com/truth/).”
You understand that that page is full of blatant lies, right? Read the comments, check the resources. You are obviously either blind, gullible or both.
Not to get off topic. I enjoy this article, I have been mainly a Picasa and Adobe Bridge user myself, so getting a good overview of the different options opened at new world to me
July 10th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
There *is* an online support forum. You obviously didn’t try clicking on the Support link, then the Forums link.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I tried some of the Linux Panorama tools such as pano-tools and hugin. They kinda worked OK, but were a bit painful to use.
I’d previously used “The Panorama Factory” (http://www.panoramafactory.com/) under Windows, and found that it runs great under Wine (at least in Fedora 8), so that’s what I use now.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Metadata in pictures is actually very well supported in Ubuntu, but there’s a catch – there’s no simple GUI that gives you the power to add / remove / edit metadata, however it is possible with the help of a few scripts to be able to easily change metadata in pictures within the nautilus file manager.
The package you need is exiftool
sudo aptitude install exiftool
I will be posting soon on the Ubuntu forums http://ubuntuforums.org/ how to add / remove / edit metadata from many different picture (and non-picture) formats.
exiftools combined with a few bash scripts and nautilus makes for truely powerful metadata tagging.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
I’ve been using exifer to edit EXIF and IPTC data for quite some time. Works well and is free. However, it is windows only, and is being discontinued.
http://www.friedemann-schmidt.com/software/exifer/
I ditto Odin’s support for Hugin. It has the best stitching flexibility I’ve found of any app. And when combined with enblend, the results are great. However, the UI is still a bit rough around the edges.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
July 10th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
awesome article. very useful ! thanx!
July 10th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Ubuntu has a nifty NTFS read-write app.. and Mac has a FUSE app that can read-write NTFS too. It’s the only compatible FS I’ve found between the two OS’s until ZFS (also FUSE-able for both) is (a) easier (b) supported natively in Mac & Linux (see: the future).
I use this NTFS method for over a year now, and it works quite well on a separate partition.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Rawstudio can be found via the add/remove apps in ubuntu.
Theres another program that can be found there called UFRaw
that says it does some of the same things.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Picasa can be used for photo management on Linux.
They even have a 64-bit version.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
I too have used ufraw with gimp and it works very well for amateur purposes. I would be very interested to see what someone who works with it daily would think.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
For photo stitching under linux, I recommend Hugin, which I got from the Ubuntu depositories.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
I wonder what do you think of blueMarine?
July 10th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Hugin as listed above is nice,
the new GIMP with the new backend library is also supposed to be out soon,
also though it is a PAIN (don’t do this unless you enjoy it)sometimes you can generally compile linux apps for OS X with some help from macports or fink (I usually have to install the compiler and dependencies via fink/macports than manually compile the source)
July 10th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Digikam and Ufraw is a very powerful combination. ICC is a pain to set up but once it is working it’s on par with the mentioned commercial tools.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
The feature I am looking for is the ability to associate an audio file with an image.
The purpose is to narrate a family photo album. As the person navigates the slideshow the narration changes with the picture.
I don’t think this exists yet but it didn’t hurt to ask if anyone has seen such a beast.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
On transferring files between Ubuntu and Mac, NFS works great if you have a network setup. You have to utilize the -p switch on one side, (I seem to recall, this was an issue with the Mac as my server was a Ubuntu box).
July 10th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
>I support Linux 100% but I feel that people should make their own decision after reading the literature at PromotingLinux.com.<
That site is so funny, especially the bits about C. I can’t imagine the bad hair day the person who runs that site must be having every day. Those people who want to stay informed read groklaw
I’d second Hugin as a great panorama stitcher. Another app is fotoxx, it does the simple stuff and has some rave reviews but I find it unusable.
f-spot with gimp works for me. It stores the photos, creates a copy when I edit them and allows me to flip easily through revisions and upload to flickr etc.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
What about bluemarine?
July 10th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Note well: Raw Therapee is “freeware” but not free software — one is at the mercy of the whims of a sole programmer for its future availability on contemporary platforms or its direction. It, like all proprietary software, unethically binds its users into slavery, and should be opposed when more ethical alternatives are available.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Huh? Comparing photo managers for Linux and not testing digiKam???
http://www.digikam.org
July 10th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I enjoyed your presentation. GraphicConverter is my mainstay, and not far from free. Wish you had included it for comparison.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
A quick search on http://freshmeat.net/ (don’t mind the name. It’s a site where people announce new versions of software.) turned up these:
http://enblend.sourceforge.net
http://cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift/
http://hugin.sf.net (already mentioned above)
http://pnmstitch.sourceforge.net
July 10th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Maybe I’m missing something. Your intro indicates you were going to examine free software and open source alternatives to Aperture but a lot of the software you tried is non-free, proprietary software just like Aperture.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Thanks for this article. Great discussion, too.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
I use only digikam for photo management. I have not other tool to do better things for my needs, neither from Linux, Windows or Macosx side.
Our firm now have ~ 200 000 photos (half of them as raw) running on it and it is very easy to find photos. What we need is better raw support and we could trowh other raw tools out of window.
Usually we dont need anything special for raws what digikam does not already support but sometimes it is needed to make HDR photos with other tools, hopefully someday it is implented to it.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
shame…. aperture is such a P.O.S.
you’d have been better off with Adobe Lightroom…
way faster, cross platform and no stupid database locking like iphoto and aperture 1
July 10th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
You can use autopano pro – I’ve found it to be the easiest and one of the best stichers around. It is supported even on 64bit ubuntu and costs 99eur, which is not that expensive.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Several mentioned digiKam…. I totally agree, with the kipi-plugin support, I can edit raw photos, do basic post processing (cropping/color balance/red eye removal, etc) with ease. (For the curious, Kipi plugins are shared among several KDE based photo applications.)
It has great support for exporting galleries to the web, including a built in flickr uploader and picasa up loader. Its great at organizing, and using the underlying directory structure, so to add an album just copy it from your flash card to your photo directory.
I’ve been using digiKam for years, and it keeps getting better and easier to use.
http://www.digikam.org/
or
apt-get install digikam
July 10th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I discovered a plugin for the Gimp that works really well for stitching. I’m not at home now, but I think it’s called simply “Panorama” or something like that.
July 10th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I’m impressed – great to see Linux being able to fill in the niche needs
July 10th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
Great review!! Just the kind of information that people are interested in when making a switch like this. Very nice writing. Thanks!
July 10th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
There’s an old version of LightZone that was and continues to be free for Linux. It doesn’t have the ability of applying the same adjustments to multiple images, but still has the compelling zone-based UI and masking.
Also, seriously, do we care about the aesthetics of the the program used for processing images? Really? What color is your camera?
July 10th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
My $0.02 here…
If you are not afraid of the command line…
‘xv’ works great for quick viewing of images, cropping, simple manipulations, etc. It supports numerous image formats. A lightweight version of gimp. (Caveats: Shareware. Been around forever.)
Package ‘libjpeg’ provides jpegtran, cjpeg, djpeg, etc. Useful for lossless rotations of jpeg images.
Package ‘ImageMagick’ provides identify, mogrify, montage, composite, animate, etc.
A quick perl script will let you produce thumbnailed images + HTML, letting any web browser quickly look over all your photos.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Hi,
I’m a photographer too. I’m tied to MS-Windows for CS3, but I’ve tested CS2 (my processing is very complex) on Linux using WINE extensively and I give it a BIG thumbs up. Unfortunately some of the things I do, now require CS3. However the at the speed WINE is moving these days, with Google behind it, I expect CS3 support soon.
I have a 5×300G Raid5 on Linux that I make available to my macs using NetAtalk. This could be very useful to you since the macs see the linux box as a MAC OS server. I tested accessing the linux share from the mac using SMB, NFT, and AFP. AFP ROCKS!!!
I’m also planning to replace my 300G drives with 1.5 TB drives (Seagate just announced them today), or I might wait for the 2TB to come out (and have a 10TB RAID5).
Great article. I’m looking forward to test RawTherapee soon.
Regards,
Erasmo.
July 10th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
I know that ubuntu is gnome based but it’s a real shame you didn’t pull in some kubuntu packages and play with digikam. Others have mentioned this above, but i really cannot stress it enough…
If you can’t be bothered installing it, just take a look at the screenshots and you’ll get a very good feel for what a polished and highly functional application this is:
http://www.digikam.org
July 10th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
There is nothing “proprietary” about the Aperture database. It is nothing more than a folder with an extension that flags it as the Aperture database. Remove the extension and the file turns into an ordinary folder, with all images witting there, untouched. And the actual database portion is nothing more than SQLite3 and is open to third-parties.
That being said, I wish you luck in your search, I just wanted to clear up these misconceptions.
-Seb
July 10th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
If you do try hugin make sure you try the latest developer build and not the latest available package at 0.7 beta 4.
July 10th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
RawTherapee is pretty good. It’s free as in beer, at least for now, but it’s not open source. Will they charge for it in future? Don’t know. Be forewarned.
I’ve been using LightZone for quite a while. It’s the only Linux program I’ve ever paid for, although I got it for an introductory price of about $125. That should tell you how much I like it. The zone method it uses is just far easier and faster for adjusting brightness /contrast. Plus you can draw regions and apply any raw processing parameter to just those selections: pretty much eliminates having to go into Gimp or PS for post-pro, at least it does for me. It also works almost as well on jpegs or tiffs.
People can rave about digikam and I’m sure it fits the needs of some. I personally hate any ‘organizer’ that first has to import to, and then maintain, a database filled with images. I insist on having a photo organizer that can just quickly browse existing disk folders with no importing. For that reason both Digikam and F-Spot are out for me. I find that browsing in Nautilus and previewing and slide showing in Image Viewer are pretty much all I need for organizing.
Picasa would be pretty cool, I find it extremely intuitive and I like how you can apply a bunch of edits to a whole crop of photos without altering the original. It’s a database driven program, but it doesn’t import duplicates of every shot in your disk, unlike most of the others. But what really kills it for me is there’s no full screen slide show in Linux, which is just idiotic and pretty much tosses the whole thing for me anyway.
July 10th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I have found digikam to have all the features I need–a great hybrid of folders and tags for management, raw image support, and great plugins (kipi) that allow raw/jpeg reprocessing. In particular, try the “white balance” plugin, which includes options for correcting exposure and gamma, and the “aspect ratio crop” plugin, which even has a golden ratio mode built in.
July 10th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Rawstudio is very good (http://rawstudio.org)
July 10th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
where is digiKam?!
damn it!
July 10th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
For photo stiching, I’m using “hugin – Panorama photo stitcher” in Ubuntu. Works like a champ for me!
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
July 10th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Someone else said it, but again – you can’t claim to review Linux photo managers and not check out Digikam! Import from camera, auto rotate, tagging (EXIF, IPTC, JPG comments), geo tagging with mapping, export to Flickr or web galleries, some great editing tools (including all sorts of ratios and crop guides) – it’s got it all. Also very actively developed – new features coming all the time. Check it out: http://www.digikam.org
July 11th, 2008 at 1:03 am
ugh, you said ‘Qtpfsgui is an HDR tool for Ubuntu Linux, Macintosh, and Windows.’ — please do not refer to Ubuntu Linux as something different from Linux. If it works on Ubuntu, then it works on Linux.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:30 am
Raw Therapee is closed source and only runs on 32 bit Linux. They have a package on their site labeled amd64, but it contains a 32 bit executable. Closed source software sucks, whether native Linux or run in a VM. Because it’s closed source, I can’t compile it for my machine. If the developer get’s hit by a train, that’s the end of it. I’ll stick to open source offerings as my time is too valuable to invest in something that I have no control over.
July 11th, 2008 at 2:53 am
You (and all comments so far) missed kphotoalbum – it’s got excellent support for managing large databases by tagging photos. For a while I used this + a custom script that would let me reprocess RAW photos using UFRaw (which you also missed) – however, kphotoalbum was far too buggy for everyday use. It may have improved now though!
July 11th, 2008 at 4:04 am
Personnally, I’m using Kphotoalbum since +4 years(www.kphotoalbum.org) to manage (via tags) my +9000 photos and Showfoto + Gimp for editing.
Integration between those tools is facilitated thanks to the very flexible architecture of KPhotoalbum.
July 11th, 2008 at 4:13 am
For multiplatform free photostitching have a look at http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
July 11th, 2008 at 4:29 am
From the article:
“It does not however have any photo-management capabilities. No tagging, project management, or meta data editing. I wish its .bib file that it stores next to each image to track its changes was a hidden file.”
Bibble Pro has support for tagging and meta data editing (IPTC) but it’s true that there is no project management. Also, as it is mentioned, Bibble is fast, and the Pro version even more so on multi-core or multi-CPU computers, thanks to multithreading.
And yes, those .bib files are a pain in the behind.
I use Bibble Pro on OSX and while the interface is quirky and sometimes downright hideous it really gets the job done and offers one of the best RAW-converters I’ve tried.
July 11th, 2008 at 4:34 am
You guys might want to give Ubuntu Studio a try.
It offers specific MultiMedia Packages.
Gnome in particular is slightly tweaked to speed things up.
Hardy also comes with realtime kernel by default,
which might have an impact on data processing.
And you’ll find a nice collection of above discussed applications installed by default.
July 11th, 2008 at 6:00 am
Bibble Pro does IPTC editing, and will insert the IPTC information into TIFFs/JPEGs it exports.
Under 4, it’s a bit primitive – one photo at a time only – but 5 promises improvements, as always!
I found the best thing about the Bibble implementation is that it can store keywords, locations and other strings for later re-use – and these are just stored in text files. It doesn’t even sort the text files on loading them into the dialogue box, which means that I get plenty of control – I can put my most commonly used tags at the top of the list, to prevent scrolling in the dialogue box/drop-downs for them. Very handy!
(Similarly, Bibble’s work queues are also “just text files” in your profile – making manual editing and automated production very easy.)
Someone else mentioned colour management – Bibble’s got that covered. Provide an ICC profile from your monitor’s manufacturer, and it’ll do CMS for its own window quite happily. I believe it’s using a Kodak CMS library for that, and I’ve found it saves a certain amount of time and effort over setting up full colour management for X itself.
You can semi-hide .bib files – you can get Bibble to store them centrally in your profile, rather than with the files. (See this thread: http://support.bibblelabs.com/webboard/viewtopic.php?t=4420)
Unfortunately, that won’t cross operating systems – as the handling of profiles is different on each OS.
Hiding them via the filesystem isn’t possible either, as Bibble has to be filesystem agnostic – it runs on Mac, Linux and Windows, and there’s no common way to hide files on each of the filesystem(s) those platforms use. So it’s either centralising them, or storing them with the RAW files.
Personally, I found the storing of the .bib files alongside the RAW files excellent – it makes backup and synchronisation between machines much simpler. I use the Unison program (find it in Synaptic – it’s a friendly version of RSync!) to synchronise my local files with a network storage device, so I can then pull down a subset of files to a laptop if needed. It may be a little ugly when you’re browsing, but it simplifies 99% of synchronisation and migration problems!
Overall, I couldn’t have moved to Linux without Bibble Pro. It’s worth every penny, and I’m just waiting for the next version to blow me away…
July 11th, 2008 at 8:27 am
I wonder why no-one has mentioned gthumb yet? I find it satisfactory for my needs. Imports, rotates, browse/view by folder or category, makes web album (which are quite nice-looking), easy exif and comment editing. Only significant limitation for me is that the web-export is just for ‘current selected set’ rather than helping manage/update an entire collection online. (Curator was much better at this but seems to have mouldered rather since about 2000 – I guess there are others now)
July 11th, 2008 at 10:15 am
kphotoalbum is what I use for metadata management. It’s real strength is searching, since I have about 4000 photos (so far!) it helps a lot!
July 11th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
+1 Autopano pro for stitching
Not free, but absolutely excellent, terrifically fast, and some HDR potential also (cross platform is a bonus). It basically does all the stitching automatically and you can simply point it at a folder of images and it figures out which ones go in each pano automatically
http://www.autopano.net/
July 11th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
imgSeek is very interresting to try: it has a very special way to find back pictures by allowing you to draw a sketch of what you are looking for.
The results are impressing, but I have yet to try it with a big photo collection (to date, I’ve only did some quick test with ~100 photos).
July 11th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
IS blueMarine even still alive? It looks kind of stagnant.
July 12th, 2008 at 6:48 am
blueMarine is alive and kicking – there have been around 2500 code commits since the latest release in October, but I was able in the meantime only to provide untested snapshots. One of the reasons is a completely new facility for managing metadata, which required quite a few changes in various parts of the application.
July 12th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Let’s keep clear two different goals that need to intermesh cleanly:
goal 1. A clean easy to use work process for turning a raw photo into one or more finished photos.
goal 2. A way to manange large numbers of photos, possibly with multiple versions.
I don’t think it is reasonable to expect the same app to do both. Of the many apps I’ve tried the one that comes closest for goal 2 is IMatch. It uses a concept, “Controlled vocabulary” to for tagging. In CV you have a tangled hierarchy of tags. E.g.
Suppose that I have a category ‘Trips’
Under Trips I have Italy_2006, England_2007, Kelona_Easter_2004
But I also have a category ‘Orchards’ and Kelona_Easter_2004 is a member of Orchards.
The act of tagging a photo Kelona_Easter_2004 automatically gives it a virtual tag of ‘Orchards” and ‘Trips’
This functionality, available in a 50 buck winsooze program, I can’t find in any linux program. I’m building a ndw box now. I’m going to get VMworkstation just to run IMatch and Photoshop.
July 13th, 2008 at 2:26 am
Most of the things you list Bibble as not having will be present in the forthcoming Bibble 5 version.
-Eric
July 13th, 2008 at 6:02 am
For the record, the functionality mentioned by Sherwood Botsford is available in blueMarine by means of hyerarchical tags – e.g. I have implemented in it the bird taxonomy (a hierarchy of names to describe a specific kind of bird such as “Anseriformes / Anatidae / Anser / anser” which identifies the greylag goose) – assigning to a photo the “anser” tag makes it available under searches for Anseriformes or Anatidae, etc…
In any case, the application is not ready yet for production use. I welcome any suggestion to the appication’s forums.
July 14th, 2008 at 10:11 am
try digiKam
Some of the previous posts are incorrect or the user was using an old version of digiKam. You can edit RAW files directly in 16 bit mode, conversion is done when you save as JPG. You don’t have to “import” the image files.
July 14th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
I use digikam exclusively for managing my photos. Love the White balance tool. Yes, there are always other apps I may have to use to tweak the photos, mostly gimp (cross platform, same scripts), and occasionally the crap software that came with my Nikon. Have played some with Picasa on linux, and found that it is good at lightening shadows.
I refuse to shell out hundreds of $$ for Adobe products when I can do almost everything I need to do open source.
July 15th, 2008 at 9:56 am
jeni, thanks for your contribution to the Troll Cave! http://vadi-blog.com/2008/07/15/the-troll-cave/
July 28th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
If you liked LightZone you can probably find the old (2.4) version online somewhere, free but unsupported, I use it and it works well.
August 9th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
I agreed with you
August 13th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Hi. Great summary, thanks. I did believe i know every possible Linux Image application, but i was wrong
My advice is wait for Xnview. They have a old Motif based Linux port, but it doesn’t really work well. Now they port her Code to Qt4, looks very promising. It supports really every image format and has integrated jpeg loseless crop, rotate, flip feature, color correction and much more. It loads images faster then any other application i know. The GUI is fast too.
Btw, wine is now very mature! You can use many popular Windows Program. I use XNview for Windows on Linux. Don’t forget Picasa use wine and it’s really stable (i am a trusted beta tester and really love it).
For metadata editing i recommend to create your own script. EXIF is supported for every popular scripting language (i use python), i am not sure about the others. You don’t have to know much about programming – i think the script will not be more then 10 Lines of code. If u find out how to read the Aperture Database it pretty easy to loop over all files and store the data inside the images. However, keep in mind Aperture did use a Database for some reason, its much faster if u doing a search, that’s the primary reason for such data, isn’t it? I would use Sqlite or HSQLDB for such a purpose.
Hope u will not lost enjoy Linux. We have a big lack with creative Software but its continuously improving.
August 17th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Nothing touches Photoshops apps, IMHO. It’s not just the usability or functionality, but the intuitiveness of the interface and the ability to perform multiple tasks all in one place. That being said, there are some pretty good apps in Linux, without even mentioning the G word. Free, open source or bought and paid for- we NEED to have something, yes? LightZone, Bibble and Raw Therapee all are very nicely performing apps. Gthumb, digikam, picassa, etc all are nice apps, but they all leave me wanting something more.
Its exactly what keeps me going to my CS2 on wine or even having to boot into XP to use CS3.
I’m also keeping an eye on blueMarine, as it looks to me to have great potential and I can see a really super app developing there; nice work Fabrizio!
j~
October 17th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I add my voice to the chorus of people that suggest Digikam: it’s great, and fast improving!
And also, it doesn’t force you (not anymore) to put your image in a specific database. You just have to put your images inside a directory, that you can organize as you wish. Any directory is seen as an “album”, a very natural way to organize images.
And after you tagged your shots, it writes theese informations in appropriate metadata tags *inside* the image, so you can move files around without losing info!
With Gimp and ImageMagick, it’s my definitive solution for photo management and processing. And next release will be even, even better!
November 25th, 2008 at 8:31 am
I find GQview convenient for library management and slide show control, particularly with a dual head setup. I use GIMP for most editing and, for printing, PhotoPrint.
April 21st, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Sad to say, Picasa 3 upon regular use reveals some fatal flaws. When my laptop comes out of sleep mode, Picasa has to reload its entire database before it will display thumbnails (this is for folders that have already been scanned) – and it takes 45 minutes or longer to display thumbnails from a moderately large external USB drive. Completely unacceptable.
Then again, if you don’t load photos into Picasa 3 directly from camera, but ask it to add and scan a new folder, it takes forever – really, it’s unpredictable. “Don’t call us…” It can take 30 minutes or longer. This is just a fatal, fatal flaw. Sadly, that leaves no other good open-source Linux photo manager.
April 25th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
I like Picasa 3 best, under Linux and Windows. I love its intuitive interface, quick browsing, easy search (using both folders and tags), effortless, non-destructive editing, and efficient workflow. After Picasa, it’s hard to adapt to another photo-management and editing system. However, under Ubuntu, unlike under Windows, I find that Picasa freezes up after adding a few thousand photos to its database of watched folders. So I am dithering between dropping Picasa completely, or using it to do work only on specific folders (like recent stuff from my camera). The trouble is that occasionally I need to pull a few selected photos from across all my photo collection, edit them and create a collection, usually on the web. Digikam is excellent at organization, but, unless I’m mistaken, not so effective at collecting photos (there I miss Picasa’s tray). Nautilus is a whizz at moving photos around. Lightzone is a great editor – right now they are offering it for $150. My dilemma is how to best juggle these tools together and deal with photo projects quickly and efficiently.
July 10th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Great article on photo editing in Linux, thanks for your contribution!
July 17th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
I went through the above post rather quickly / Any one doing projects with photos should be aware of ImageMagick http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php it does much , its only drawback is that it runs from a command line. The literature says it will run on Windows however I have not had success with that. It does not matter to me personally I use Ubuntu exclusively. Another point does not Mac OSX basically have BSD under it somewhere. If this is correct as I have many times that it is, the computer should be able to run VMWare which means the computer will run any software on the planet. Just a thought, Dale
August 27th, 2009 at 5:46 am
thanx a alot for the info browe.. Its answer all my questions..
and know its time for some experiment.. hehehe..
November 7th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
my buddy wrote a meta data program he is quite proud of see it at impressive.net