Running Linux, 5th Edition - Matthias Kalle Dalheimer [167]
Digikam
Digikam is the KDE digital camera application. It uses libgphoto2 to interface to cameras. A screenshot is shown in Figure 9-10.
Kooka
Kooka is the KDE scanner program. It supports scanners using the SANE library. As well as basic image scanning, Kooka supports optical character recognition of text using several OCR modules. A screenshot is shown in Figure 9-11.
Imaging Tools
A variety of tools are available for acquiring, manipulating, and managing digital images on your computer. In this chapter, we look at some of them.
Image management with KimDaBa
Many applications for viewing images exist, and in our experience, they can be grouped into two main categories: those which are good at generating HTML pages from your image sets, and those which are cool for showing fancy slide shows. The number of applications in both categories is counted in hundreds if not thousands, mostly differing in things that would be considered taste or even religion. You can browse the Linux application sites for your favorite application. Here we focus on an application with a slightly different set of design goals.
Figure 9-9. Gtkam
Figure 9-10. Digikam
Figure 9-11. Kooka
KimDaBa (KDE Image DataBase) is best explained by the following quote from its home page:
If you are like me you have hundreds or even thousands of images ever since you got your first camera, some taken with a normal camera, others with a digital camera. Through all the years you believed that until eternity you would be able to remember the story behind every single picture, you would be able to remember the names of all the persons on your images, and you would be able to remember the exact date of every single image.
I personally realized that this was not possible anymore, and especially for my digital images—but also for my paper images—I needed a tool to help me describe my images, and to search in the pile of images. This is exactly what KimDaba is all about.
The basic idea behind KimDaBa is that you categorize each image with who is in it, where it was taken, and a keyword (which might be anything you later want to use for a search). When looking at your images, you may use these categories to browse through them. Figure 9-12 shows the browser of KimDaBa.[*]
Figure 9-12. Browsing images with KimDaBa
Browsing goes like this: at the top of the list shown in Figure 9-12 you see items for Keywords, Locations, Persons, and so on. To find an image of, say, Jesper, you simply press Persons and, from the list that appears, choose Jesper. Now you are back to the original view with Keywords, Locations, Persons, and so forth. Now, however, you are in the scope of Jesper, meaning that KimDaBa only displays information about images in which Jesper appears. If the number of images is low enough for you to find the image you have in mind, then you may simply choose View Images. Alternatively, repeat the process. If you want to find images with Jesper and Anne Helene in them, then simply choose Persons again, and this time choose Anne Helene. If you instead want images of Jesper in Las Vegas, then choose Locations and, from that view, Las Vegas.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. For KimDaBa this means that you need to categorize all your images, which might be a rather big task — if you have thousands of images. KimDaBa is, however, up to this task — after all, one of its main design criteria is to scale up to tens or even hundreds of thousands of images.
There are two ways of categorizing images in KimDaBa, depending on your current focus, but first and foremost let's point out that the categorizing tasks can be done step by step as you have time for them.
The first way of categorizing images is by selecting one or more images in the thumbnail view (which you get to when you press View Images), and then press the right mouse button to get to the context menu. From the context menu, either choose Configure Images One at a Time (bound to Ctrl-1) or Configure All Images Simultaneously (bound