My photo manager of choice is digiKam, but for aesthetics, I’ll write it as “Digikam”. Digikam is a photo manager written using the Qt framework and the KDE libraries. What this means is that anyone using the K Desktop Environment (KDE) will find that this software fits right in with their other programs. Users of other desktop environments can also enjoy this software, although it may not match their other commonly used programs.

Recently, KDE’s library software of software have been ported to Windows. This means Windows users can enjoy the same KDE software as Linux users have enjoyed for some time now. Even though Digikam is not a part of KDE’s library of software, it is available to install on Windows.

Downloading and Installing Digikam

Digikam is available through the KDE on Windows installer. The way software on Linux works is that one program may use another program to perform tasks for it, such as Digikam using another program called “jpeg” to perform operations on JPEG images, and using a program called “Marble” to display a globe of the Earth to show where geo-tagged photos were taken. Because of this dependency, installing Digikam will require also installing jpeg, Marble, and other software. This is all handled through the KDE on Windows installer.

To begin, I visited The KDE on Windows Project web page, and navigated to the download section. I downloaded and ran the installer. (It’s good to save the installer somewhere, as it’s used for uninstalling and upgrading as well.)

I selected to “Install from Internet”. I went with the default installation directory, “C:\Program Files\KDE”. For the “Install Mode”, I left the default set to “End User”. The “Local Storage Settings” I kept default as well, then I next selected that I have a direct connection to the Internet (default setting).

When prompted for a download server, I selected one in my country, and next I was given a selection of which KDE release I wanted to install from. Only “stable” versions were shown, and selecting “stable latest” ensured that I’d be downloading the most recent release.

Using the KDE installer, I have access to the whole KDE library of software, and I can install any KDE software I want to from this interface. Unfortunately, most software is grouped together in suites of related software, so you have to download many applications in one category to get a specific program. Digikam is not a standard part of the KDE suite, so it is available separately. (It’s currently listed as “UNSTABLE” in the “Package notes”, probably due to some known bugs and lack of functionality, which make it less desirable to recommend to anyone for use yet.)

I selected “digikam-msvc” and also “kipi-plugins-msvc”. The latter is plugins for working with images in extra ways. The “msvc” refers to the compiler used to convert the source code into an executable program.

The next page lists related packages which will have to be downloaded. As I wrote above, “jpeg” is required for Digikam to be able to work with JPEG format images. Likewise, “Marble” is necessary. This one comes as part of the “kdeedu” suite, so all “kdeedu” software must be downloaded and installed. It would be nice if only Marble were downloaded, and not the whole suite of education programs.

The next step was to sit back and wait for 48 packages to download, totalling 6,6380 KB (that would be “64 MB”). Installation followed directly after the download finished. After this, the software was accessible from the Windows menu, under “All Programs”, “KDE 4.2.2 Release”.

KDE software under the Windows menu has a subfolder for each suite of software, and those required by Digikam, installed under the “Education”, “Graphics”, and “Internet” folders. Digikam appears under the “Graphics” folder.

Using Digikam

For some reason, I can only run programs as the system administrator. This is woefully inadequate, and a show-stopper. Perhaps I can find a way to install the software locally for a user with all packages stored in folders permitted for that user, but installing something systemwide should not require actually running as the admin user to run the software.

Since I had to run as admin, this meant no direct access to my files in my user account (not that there were many). Even worse, Digikam said I didn’t have write access to the system admin’s “Pictures” folder while running as system admin. Creating a subfolder (which I chose to call “Digikam”) in Explorer to use solved that problem, but it sure wasn’t a pretty way to do it!

With Digikam getting going, I found I need to give “kconf_update.exe” permission to run. That simply interrupts the flow. Even worse, it ran again soon after, so again my workflow was interrupted as I had to tell Windows to allow or deny it doing whatever it this program wanted to do.

Okay, okay, I need photos to work with here. I copied Windows Vista’s default photos into my “Pictures/Digikam” folder. These, Digikam instantly recognized, and it loaded in their tags and ratings, information association availble in Windows Vista.

From here on out, everything looks the same as in Linux. I can view an image. I can also perform batch operations, such as converting RAW images to another format (such as JPEG), applying a filter or color change to many images, resize or rename images, and so on. The Kipi plugins allow me to export photos to Flickr, to Facebook, and more.

I can edit an image, as well. Digikam includes a decent range of useful tools. It can show where a photo is over- or under-exposed (“View” menu). There are tools to adjust curves, levels, perform auto-correction, adjust the white balance, make a photo black and white, and more (“Color” menu). One can sharpen or blur an image, as well as fixing red eye and reducing noise (“Enhance” menu). The image can be flipped or rotated, and resized or cropped, and so forth (“Transform” menu). Borders and text and textures can be applied (“Decorate” menu). Various filters, such as a blur effect, charcoal drawing, and oil paint can be performed (“Filters” menu).

If I had a large library of photographs, I’d likely want to be able to search through them easily. Aside from tagging images, Digikam offers two sets of search options. There’s a basic keyword search (with an advanced option to search specifcially within tags, photo properties, photo caption, comment, title, etc.) Then there’s the “fuzzy search”, which can find photos that are similar to a reference photo, find photos which are duplicates with no or little modifications (resized, different format, modified colors), and find photos based on a drawing of what the photo looks like (as seen above). Searches can be saved for re-use later.

Other than the whole permissions problem with the KDE software, the only problem I found with Digikam itself is that the context (right-click) menus are all empty. Other than this, everything I tested was stable and working well. Consider that Windows Vista Home Basic runs super-slow on my laptop, I am amazed at the relatively quick speed Digikam performs tasks.

Final Thoughts

My hope is to be able to recommend it to Windows users who currently do not use a photo manager, but may soon need one. I don’t know whether this permission issue I faced is common or not (I couldn’t find anything about it via a Google search, so I’ll have to look for the KDE on Windows bug system to see if it’s been reported). The kconf_update.exe could be an issue, as well. If these two problems didn’t exist, I’d be recommending Digikam (and maybe a few other programs) to Windows users right now.