I got my first “nice” camera early last year, and soon realized I needed a nice way to organize my photos. At first, I decided to use Picasa because it seemed to have a nice beginner interface, and more importantly, it “worked” in Linux. For most of the year, I got by with Picasa for organization and Gimp for times of extra editing.
By the end of the year, I had gotten fed up with Google’s lack of Linux support for Picasa, felt I had “grown” past using it for my photos anyway, and began searching for alternative programs to organize my photo library.
Meanwhile, I had gotten a Macbook Pro and discovered that iPhoto was actually pretty good at organizing photos, while offering decent basic adjustments – but, it is only for OSX. I wanted something for my desktop, and wanted it to run in Linux (I only boot into Windows rarely for gaming). Unfortunately, this left me with few options.
After searching online for a while, I stumbled upon digiKam, which seemed ideal because it was cross platform, and offered photo library management and a decent set of editing tools. It is impossible though, to search for “photo organizing software” and NOT see recommendations for Adobe Lightroom, but meh, it wasn’t available on Linux.
This brought me to an important decision: use digiKam and stay in sweet Linux land, or conform to the dark side and give into using Lightroom in Windows (yes, I could use Lightroom on my macbook, but I wanted to use my nice desktop and large monitor for photo stuffs). So at the time, the choice was easy: screw Windows, I just found my new Linux based photo-workflow!
(Note: a little while after choosing digiKam, I found another alternative: darktable that looked very similar to Lightroom, but was very awkward to use, and just didn’t seem to offer much more.)
Fast-forward 6 months to today, and guess what? I’m giving in to Lightroom. Yup, not only am I ditching free digiKam for paid Lightroom, but this also forces me to give up editing on my Ubuntu desktop and use my Apple laptop instead (yes, I hate Windows that much, and Lightroom is that awesome)!
Don’t get my wrong, digiKam is still the best photo organization software in Linux (with darktable catching up), and it’s free! But, after giving Lightroom 4 a good try, I am convinced this is the gold standard of photography workflow software. Period.
It is unfortunate Adobe doesn’t support Linux in their software, especially since OSX is Unix-based! Accepting this tragedy though, it is also a shame I didn’t just start off with Lightroom to begin with.
In the end, digiKam got me very far, and I’m glad I gave it a fair shot, but it still pales in functionality comparison to Lightroom, and also I felt that I had grown out of another tool. I am excited about finally learning to use the ever popular Adobe Lightroom for my photography workflows, but man, I wish it worked in Linux 🙂
(p.s. checkout my new 500px account!)
I am jealous of your camera and your skills. I too am getting tired of Picasa. It is okay for tiny adjustments, but I want more. But . . . I also don’t wanna pay. We need to hang.
So what exactly made you pay for Lightroom? What are the shortcomings of Digikam that are worth mentioning? So far, digikam is the most feature complete application I found, even counting against lots of commercial alternatives.
@Frank:
First, thanks for the feedback!
To answer your question, first let me say that Digikam is very nice and improving significantly with each release.
That being said, at the time of writing the post, I felt that Lightroom was superior in a few ways.
One of them was the way Lightroom handles non-destructive editing (I didn’t see an intuitive way to do this at the time), and got tired of having multiple versions of each image physically on disk. Another was the Develop module lays out easy sliders to use all in one place, instead of digging through Edit menus; the shortcut keys are also essential to my workflow as well. Finally, (at the time) I liked the idea of a larger community creating plug-ins available to use for Lightroom (not so many for Digikam). In general, I thought that Lightroom was easier and faster to navigate than Digikam.
Important note: I haven’t used Digikam since I wrote the post, so things may have changed since then.
Thanks for reminding me; I will give Digikam a second try though in the near future :).
Also, if you don’t know about Dark Table, then check that out too; I have been meaning to do a comparison of Lightroom with DarkTable as well; it is the closest thing I’ve seen to Lightroom for Linux.
Anyway, hope that helps; take care!
~Chris
Hi, thanks for your reply! My main focus is asset management, not editing, so Lightroom and also Darktable do not seem like first choices to me as they seem to be focused on editing. I have about 45000 photos and 10000 movie clips (avi, mov, mp4) and I do little editing, but a lot of tagging (free form as well as GPS and faces) because I want to be able to find images quickly.
Currently I use iPhoto which works and is stable but has some drawbacks, one of which is the data format (exporting all meta data of images is possible, since iPhoto is just “images plus a SQLite db” but not trivial), another is the tiny GPS tagging map which cannot be resized.
Whatever solution I find in the end, I need a clean import of all my images, and most apps currently do not do that.