Scribbles and Snaps

digiKam is a truly versatile and powerful application for managing and tweaking photos, but it’s not the only photographic tool around. In fact, there are a few other nifty open source utilities that can make great additions to your photographic toolbox. Here are a couple of such tools worth considering.

Using a dedicated tool for offloading photos from your camera may sound superfluous (after all, you can do that using digiKam or simply dragging photos from the camera to the hard disk), but Rapid Photo Dowloader has a few clever tricks up its sleeve. For starters, it’s fast and supports multiple simultaneous downloads, so if your camera has two card slots, you can transfer photos from both of them in one go. More importantly, you can configure the way Rapid Photo Downloader processes and sorts the downloaded photos. In the Download Folder section of the Preferences dialog window, you can specify the destination folder and define rules for organizing the downloaded photos into subfolders. For example, you can create a rule that moves photos taken on a specific date into a separate subfolder. This way the photos taken on February 17, 2010 are downloaded into the /2010/20100217 subfolder, while photos from May 1, 2010 are downloaded into the /2010/20100501 subfolder. Rapid Photo Downloader can also rename photos during download using user-defined rules. For example, using the rule shown in the figure below, Rapid Photo Downloader renames photos using the date and time information from the photo’s EXIF metadata. So the utility replaces a meaningless file name like DSC_0023.JPG with 20100101-135533.JPG.

The Backup section lets you specify a destination directory where Rapid Photo Downloader will store backup copies of the downloaded photos. For example, you can specify an external USB storage device as the backup destination, and Rapid Photo Downloader will automatically back up the photos while downloading them from your camera.

Tonido is not a dedicated photographic tool per se, but this server solution includes the nifty Photos application which lets you share your photos with other users easily and securely. You might wonder why you’d want to use Tonido to share photos when there are dozens of Web-based photo sharing services out there. For starters, you can use Tonido to share photos without uploading them to a third-party service. This means that you remain in complete control of your images. More importantly, Tonido lets you share your photos securely and only with people you explicitly give access to your photo collection.

Sharing your snaps using Photos is easy. Start with adding a directory containing photos to the application. To do this, switch to the Photos application, click on the Share My Photos link and click on the Add New Share link. Select then the directory you want to share, pick the group you want (or create a new one on-the-fly), and press OK. This automatically pushes your photos to all users in the selected group, and all photos shared by other users appear in your Photos application. All shared photos are actually copied and stored on your machine, so you can view them even if the user who shares them is offline. Similar to Flickr and other photosharing services, Photos lets you tag, rate, and comment photos as well as mark them as your favorites. Using the commands in the navigation bar to the left, you can view photos by tags, ratings, and users. You can also quickly view the most recent photos as well as photos in a specific group.

But what if you want to publish your photos on the Web? No problem, Tonido lets you create public photo albums with just a few mouse clicks using the Webshare application. Just press the Share Photos button, select the directory containing photos, and configure the gallery settings. That’s it!