So I already wrote about the pain of photo management. I did finally get all my photos in the same place and have removed most of the duplicates. I am now back to searching for a suitable program/programs to use in a photo workflow.

My requirements haven’t changed much- I even got rid of a few options:

• Allows upload to Flickr in the most painless way possible- but exporting to a folder will work.
• Allows tags, and those tags must also upload to Flickr so I don’t have to tag twice. It must also embed tags in the photo itself in some kind of standard way.
• Allow for basic fixes- color correction, cropping, brightness/contrast, etc.
• Not 100% necessary, but I really like some kind of straightening feature (Picassa and F-Spot have this) because I tend to take crooked pics.

The most difficult thing is tagging- if I didn’t care about tagging on my computer, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But I do. I would be willing to import photos, tag them, and then add them to a photo management program, but I can’t find anything for that either. I have so far evaluated three programs in depth. Here is a short list of pros and cons of each.

F-Spot (Gnome Linux)

Pros

• Dead simple to use - one long stream of photos, which I like the best for browsing photos.
• Lovely tagging features- while viewing a photo, I just press “t” and enter tags separated by a comma.  I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts.
• Nice, simple image editing features. Kinda like Picassa, which I also like.
• Has a really nice versioning system.

Cons

• Will not let me just keep the images where they are- it insists on importing, putting into a new folder, and reorganizing by a date based file structure. This wouldn’t be a big deal if I didn’t already have a lot of past images separated into categories.
• Rotating is done by marking exif data, which isn’t recognized when I upload to Flickr, which means I have to re-rotate in Flickr. I can get past this by rotating using the Ubuntu image browsing program instead.

Really, I could totally live with this program if it would only leave my photos where they are! Maybe I should just let it go, but I find this a major limitation. I also think it will be very problematic if I ever need to do a wipe of the hard drive again.

DigiKam (KDE Linux)

Pros

• Very full featured- lots of photo editing options, powerful search, can do saved searches, albums, lots of ways to slice and dice your photos.
• Exports to Flickr
• Pretty - it is a nice looking program.

Cons

• Not very usable- at least for me. There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but not for what I want to do. For instance, there’s a keyboard shortcut to add a tag to the list of tags, but not one to add it to the photo.
• So far, I can’t get tags to upload to Flickr.
• As far as I can tell, no “photostream” view- you have to chose an album or a folder, so short of moving all my photos into one album, I can’t look at everything at once.
• Although image editing is robust, it’s annoying to do quick fixes.

At first DigiKam looked like exactly what I was looking for- it is surprisingly full featured, and it exports to Flickr natively (and other online image programs). It even runs pretty well in Gnome even though it is a KDE program. But I have found it frustratingly hard to use. I can’t quickly use the keyboard to enter tags- I have to select from a list, which, when you tag a lot, can get annoying. I feel like I am missing things in this program - features are not as apparent as in F-spot (mostly because it has lots of other features).

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Windows, free 30 day trial)

Pros

• Sleek and professional, which one would expect, since it is a $300 program.
• Has tagging which writes to EXIF info.
• Very quick and responsive.
• As expected from adobe, nice photo adjustment features

Cons

• $300. Actually, I can get it for $99 (student discount), but still.
• Tagging is STILL not as easy as I would like. There’s a way to assign keywords to numbers and tag things quickly that way, but I just want to type in words. Maybe once I get used to the workflow it wouldn’t be a big deal.
• No Flickr upload, but there’s a workaround.
• Way overpowered for what I need. I like the option of other features, though.

I dunno. I actually want a Windows app, since the photos are not just mine but my husband’s as well, so it makes sense to keep them on the shared computer. I’ll have to play with lightroom a little more to see if I like it. I have not tried the flickr upload workaround yet.

Possibilities

I have not ruled out lightroom yet, but I’d really like NOT have to spend $$$. I really like the image editing features in Picassa, but it won’t embed metadata.

I’m thinking I may end up with a workflow like this:

• Import images, rotate, delete bad ones, tag (in what program??)
• Use photo editing program to fix up the best ones and then export (hopefully keeping tags)
• Use Either a flickr uploader program or a python script to upload pics to Flickr.

Keep in mind that I am not a professional photographer, and I really don’t want to be one, so this is just for hobby. I don’t need high def, I just want to get photos findable and work out a process to get them uploaded easily. I have great pictures in my backlog (I have digital images going back to 1998 and scanned images from before that) but I can’t ever find them when I need them. I am way too picky, though.

ooo! Just found this page. Maybe there’s hope…