After disliking camera phones and people using camera phones for a long long time, I finally gave up and bought myself one. I am totally in love with my new camera phone. I love it for making things so easier. I can plugin my phone and share pictures and videos with the world. It is time for me to install some nice software to organize these audio, video and image files. Specially I am looking for some tool to organize image files and upload them to Flickr.
Unfortunately there is no plenty of such tools. I only found Picasa and F-spot. Picasa is Google’s proprietary software, I don’t mind using proprietary software but it is too slow, cluttery and doesn’t match with the rest of the environment. I don’t like installing software if they are not available via synaptic. But the lack of good alternates forced me to try Glimmr and Gnickr. Glimmr installed but I can not do anything with it as the program freezes often, doesn’t connect to my flickr account and crashes whenever I try to use anything in the Go menu. I installed the deb package for Gnickr but was unable to launch it for some unknown reasons.
Now my only choice is F-spot ubuntu’s photo management utility with the release of Edgy Eft(ubuntu 6.10). I am using Dapper Drake (ubuntu 6.06 LTS) so I had to install F-spot via synaptic.
The problem I am facing with F-spot is that I would prefer adding tags in a much more easier way. I just want to select an image right click and enter all the tags I want. F-spot also comes with some pre defined categories. May be I will learn how to do these things easily with f-spot after using it for sometime.
Right now I am using Nautilus to manage photos on my hard drive. It is much easier that way. Though I am unable to tag images but I can save them in different folders and nautilus’ default preview generation makes it easy to browse these galleries. There is a Nautilus script available to upload images to flickr directly from the file manager, but I was unable to try it as the script depends on a perl module and that perl module has other dependency issues.
After spending sometime looking at the available tools for photo management on Ubuntu I have made a set of features that I want from my ideal photo management utility:
- There is no need to import and make copies of image files stored on my computer.
- Tagging should be simpler. The application should use xml and save meta data inside the image.
- Clicking on a image provides me a menu to fill meta data information such as camera used, date picture taken, whether its a modified or an original version, who owns this image, tags, notes, comments, etc.
- Image editing is a plus but it should be simpler. I would rather use image editing applications to create different versions of image.
- Uploading to flickr or web albums should be easier.
Update: I tried Digikam with Kipi-plugins under Gnome desktop environment. Unfortunately it needs Konqueror to communicate with Flickr.
jBrout is really cool (as far as I’m concerned…)
if you want a repository for it :
deb http://jbrout.free.fr/download/debian binary/
manatlan, the guy developping and maintaining jBrout, is an active member of the french community and is a really cool guy… So, imo, this repository is secure 😉
Derek, thank you for the suggestion.
Marsolin, digikam is KDE application and I use Gnome, but I think I will give it a try. I didn’t try it first because I heard that flickr upload is not available with digikam by default. I will have to download a plugin to add this functionality and even that plugin needs Konqueror to work properly.
jBrout is not available via synaptic and I have bad experiences when I tried to install from .deb or rpm packages they usually fail due to dependency issues.
digiKam and jBrout are other Linux photo managers that can upload to Flickr.
Chad
http://linuxappfinder.com
Use the latest Picasa via Wine and you’ll find a huge performance boost over the made for linux version. It works really well surprisingly. Even the web album uploading works!
Cheers.