I’ve been wandering through digiKam, an open source media viewer and editor I discovered recently. It’s pretty good stuff all around, though not without its quirks and annoyances. I’m on a pretty boss PC but digiKam can be slow as hell sometimes, especially when starting up and indexing newly added media. I also find certain menu items simply do not seem to work.

The HTML gallery generator is pretty slick. It creates HTML5 mobile responsive flat HTML galleries that generate quickly. I chose a bunch of images totally at random from my first uses of a Sony DSC-HX5 camera back in 2011 and generated galleries in the four styles supported by digiKam. See what you think:

digiKam also includes a variety of export tools, for sending photos to Flickr, Smugmug, Dropbox, and many other photo-hosting services. It even includes an export to Piwigo option, which I would not have expected. Piwigo is what I use for most of my photo dumps, essays, and galleries. Piwigo has worked out fine but at first I considered it a begrudgingly-used replacement for the late, great Gallery2, which I actually still deploy in one instance.

A slight glitch in the Piwigo export (I consider it a glitch, maybe others would not) is that it does not allow creation of a new directory on the Piwigo installation through digiKam. You have to log in as admin at your Piwigo installation and create the directory there. Could be a little sharper but I’ll take it.

I also find the export to Piwigo through digiKam a little slower than I might have expected. Uploading straight through the web browser is quite a bit faster.

Here’s the same batch of photos exported to Piwigo.

Neither the HTML gallery generator nor the Piwigo export allow for custom captioning of images. Or rather, digiKam relies on the filename for its captions. For this exercise I didn’t see fit to rename every one of those images.

I also gave the video slideshow creator a try using the same set of not-necessarily-remarkable images. I set it to choose transition patterns between images at random, finding that digiKam needed about 20 minutes to generate this masterpiece out of 56 still images. To be honest I think I’d have preferred this without all the motion and transitions, just still photos maybe transitioned by a simple fade. The mp4 file size clocked in at 65mb.

I know, I’m spinning my wheels. Been restless and have also been wasting a lot of time. Yesterday’s double-digit trek through Mount Olivet Cemetery resulted in a 40-something minute long video I don’t think I want to use. Too much lens flare and what I guess is dust on the glass surface. I was also accosted by a cemetery worker who told me no photograph or video was allowed. I did not know this. Seems to me that for as beautiful and well-maintained as the yard they’d be proud to show it off or have it shown off on social media. Maybe it’s a matter of privacy for the dead.