I once - like 15 years ago IIRC - tried Digikam on an Ubuntu machine, for like a year. It wasn’t the most successful endeavor. I remember that one day my filenames got mixed up. Probably this had more to do with the man not reading the manual than the machine being malformed. But I made the switch to Lightroom eventually.
While Lightroom is a fantastic piece of software, the longing for “owning my files” has always been there. And while Lightroom is the right tool to manage a project of like 1,000 pictures, it never felt like the right tool to curate a very large collection of photographs about “documenting life”.
In recent years I felt the urge to handle this. Because in this smartphone era, “the problem” only gets worse…
I made the jump to Capture One in '23. Didn’t work out. This year I tried ON1. Was enthusiastic about it. But the rendering of colors was off, and… oh god, AI everywhere. Do we really need this? And does ON1 really have to build around AI, or shouldn’t they only endorse AI in their software? I know the answer, and they are heading the wrong way.
So I paid for the lesson. That is true. Don’t we all?
But here I am, much more prepared than I used to be. Reading up. No pressure. Setting up Digikam on a dedicated Desktop with nice specs (nothing too shiny, but overall ok). The device used to be my Zwift setup.
After two weeks of settling in and testing, I can say that eventually today I felt for the first time that enormous relief, realizing that indeed I am in the driver’s seat again. Managing my collection works really like a breeze.
I can dig into Digikam as deep as I want to. I feel there is endless granularity in setting up the system. Now I am running with MariaDB, XMPs off (for now), Exiftool disabled, and debugviewer running so I can see in this early period what Digikam is doing, and how long it takes; what makes the software run slow or fast.
I love it. So thank you.