Manage Images and Photo Albums


There has been an amazing boom in the popularity of digital photography in the last few years. In a surprising announcement, Kodak has even said that it will no longer make film cameras. All this digital photography means that we all need a new way to keep our photos. You can print them, but you will still want to keep a digital backup. No more shoeboxes and bulky photo albums anymorenow we need to create photo albums on our hard drives and on Web sites.

First of all, managing your digital photos is another opportunity for me to bash you in the head with the directive to always, always back up your data. You don't want to lose the family photos because your computer dies. After you have organized your photos, back them up onto your preferred media for backups: burned CDs; another computer; burned DVDs, ZIP, or Jazz disks; or anything else that will hold them. Then periodically back up any new photos and albums that you acquire.

There are a lot of options for you to manage your images. Some programs create albums for you and can export those albums to online albums as well. The simplest way to organize photos into albums is to use directories in your file manager. Find a place in your home directory to create a folder for PhotoAlbums. Then organize your photos in other folders inside of there. For instance, you can create PhotoAlbums > MichelangeloVacation and have the photos sit inside that folder. Both Konquorer and Nautilus have great features for viewing thumbnail previews of images in a directory. You can double-click any image to see it in a larger view.

Although simple directories are the easy way to organize digital photo albums, they do not provide features for adding comments and notes to pictures or for easily exporting a photo album to the Web. Adding comments and notes to images is a replacement way to make up for the scrapbook-type comments or captions you might write in a physical photo album. Online photo albums are also popular. When you get family members bugging you to see those baby pictures or vacation photos, you want a quick and easy way to create online photo albums to placate the demands. A few programs in Linux can help you with all these functions, but two are standouts right now in development and available features: Digikam and gThumb.

Digikam

Program Info

Terminal command

digikam

Program URL

http://digikam.sourceforge.net/


Digikam wants to be your all-in-one photo tool. With this program, you can import photos from your digital camera (using gPhoto2 as the behind-the-scenes engine for this feature), organize those photos into albums, and do a few basic image-editing functions. Digikam is now listed as a KDE program, but you might not have it installed by default. Right now Digikam isn't available in the most common repositories for Apt and Yum, but keep checking. The best way to install Digikam might be to find a package or download the source from the project's Web site.

The photo album organization in Digikam has a lot of options. Photos in albums are sorted chronologically by default. You can also sort photos into your own categories. Views for photo albums include viewing by collection name, by the date of the image, or in a flat listing. There are also four different thumbnail sizes to view your albums in, from Small to Very Big. Adding comments to albums and images is easy, with obvious text fields for the comments.

The basic image functions in Digikam include cropping, flipping, adjusting brightness and contrast, doing gamma correction, and rotating images. You can also export images to other formats. Printing images from Digikam is easy, but deciding on page layout for your photo is limited.

Digikam offers plug-in functionality so you can extend the program to do even more. If you are so inclined, you can write your own plug-ins for new functions. Information is available on the Digikam Web site on how their plug-in development works. There are already plug-ins for viewing slideshows, e-mailing images, and archiving images to CDs or DVDs. One of the most useful plug-ins is for exporting albums to HTML. Seasoned Web developers might balk at the page designs and code used, but if you just want an easy way to get those pictures online, this works. You can certainly use the output Web pages as a base to then edit and change the pages to match your Web site. Other plug-ins available include those for working with images in batches to rename or resize them all at once, connecting with the KDE scanning program Kooka (see http://www.kde.org/apps/kooka/) to import scanned images, creating calendars, and ferreting out duplicate images in your photo albums.

gThumb

Program Info

Fedora/GNOME menu

Graphics > gThumb Image Viewer

Terminal command

gthumb

Program URL

http://gthumb.sourceforge.net


GNOME's contribution to managing your digital photos is gThumb. Fedora includes gThumb by default when you check the box for the Graphics category of programs upon install. Mandrake does not include gThumb, even when you include GNOME in your installation. gThumb supports opening .gif, .jpg, .bmp, .png, .tif, .ico, and .xpm file formats, and can save to .jpg, .png, .tiff, and .tga formats.

The layout of gThumb is a simple three-pane window. There is a toolbar with buttons for navigating photos in folders and categories, starting a slideshow, and performing a few basic editing functions. Other options are two mouse clicks away in the menus or can be shown in separate dialog boxes. You view the category or folder in the left pane and view your highlighted photo in the right pane. You can also add thumbnail viewing to your left column view (see Figure 9.9).

Figure 9.9. gThumb with thumbnails of each image.


gThumb's main interface function is to be an image viewer, with additional features for organizing and working with images. While viewing images, you can look at them as a series of thumbnail images. The image organization is done using simple files and directories. You don't have to go out to your file manager or a terminal to move, copy, or delete files and folders; gThumb gives you those functions in the program. You can add comments to each image and bookmark them for easy access later. The organization structure used in gThumb is to organize images in catalogs, and then catalogs in libraries. This differs a bit from the terms used in a photo album concept, but it works the same. Image-editing functions in gThumb are limited to basic needs. There are options to adjust image properties such as brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation. You can also rotate and scale images.

Advanced features in gThumb include exporting to Web albums, viewing slideshows, finding duplicate images, and working with images in a series, or batch. gThumb also allows for setting an image as your desktop background from within gThumb. Searching in gThumb is done well, with the capability to search for images and save the search results as a catalog or album.

TOOL KIT 9.3

Export a Photo Album for the Web with gThumb

Now that we have Michelangelo's vacation photos ready to show him, there is a problem. The dude is dead. I'm not sure how to deliver an album to whatever hereafter Michelangelo might dwell in. I suppose if you believe in heaven, it is easy to imagine that heaven has a broadband connection. That assumption makes an online photo album the best way to show Michelangelo the vacation he never took. Let's take the photos, pull them into gThumb, and export them to HTML for publishing on the Web.

1.

Open gThumb.

2.

In gThumb's left navigation column, find the folder with the photos that you want to export to the Web as an album.

3.

Highlight the images in the thumbnail view that you want to include in the Web album and then choose Tools > Create Web Album.

4.

The Web Album dialog box pops up (see Figure 9.10). Choose a Destination directory on your computer for gThumb to save your new Web album to. The final output results in both HTML pages and images, so you might want to give the photo album its own folder on your computer. The separate folder makes it easier to keep track of the files.

Figure 9.10. Configuration settings for creating a Web photo album in gThumb.


5.

Choose the name of the index file. The default is index.html, which is fine for any album you will show online in its own directory.

6.

Resize If Larger Than is a good option to use for the Web to cut down on file size. If you don't like the quality of the image after gThumb resizes it, you might not want to use this option. You can resize and optimize your images in the GIMP instead for better quality.

7.

In the Index Layout section, you choose how many rows and columns will be in the table grid created by gThumb for thumbnail previews of your images. You can also choose how your images are sorted.

8.

The Header and Footer fields are for adding titles to your pages. You can choose a predesigned theme for your pages. If you want to add your own page design, just choose the Clean theme and then edit the HTML later.

9.

Click Save to finish. You can then use your file browser to navigate to the index page in the directory you chose to save the photo album in. Open your photo album in a browser. The Web photo album created consists of a few simple HTML pages with navigation. If you like what was created, upload the pages and images to your Web server. If you want to tweak the look or navigation images of the Web album, the pages are HTML that you can edit or swap out images from.




Linux Desktop(c) Garage
Linux(R) Desktop Garage
ISBN: 0131494198
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 141

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