I’ve been wandering through digiKam, an open source media viewer and editor I discovered recently. It’s pretty good\u00a0stuff 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.<\/p>\n
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:<\/p>\n
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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Here’s the same batch of photos exported to Piwigo<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n