XnView is also very capable, and perhaps lighter weight.
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I use Shotwell. But I’m on linux, I don’t know if there is the Windows version.
For a quick look, I still use XnViewMP from time to time. But the all superior software is digiKam, especially when assigning keywords this software is great, against it XnViewMP is almost useless.
But you have to learn digiKam a bit, without it you can’t do anything.
I use Digikam to do some stuff with Geolocation metadata (for example it can do geo correlation from gpx files, and write the metadata to .xmp files that Art can read).
You didn’t mention what OS you are using. That will affect what packages are available to you. It’s also important to know what your expectations for an image catalog are.
I import my images on Linux using Rapid Photo Downloader, and my directory names are keyword-rich. I can quickly locate photos by date, subject matter, and camera used. I use Geeqie for viewing. This setup is fast and lightweight for me. Of course, if your requirements are more sophisticated, that setup may not meet your needs.
No matter the RAW editor, photo management begins and ends with digiKam. There is simply no other FOSS application that comes close.
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Definitely digiKam. A few months ago I looked carefully at digiKam and XnView MP for a client, as well as for my own photography and a historical archive. Once you learn and understand digiKam it’s fast and powerful.
XnView is great for batch processing, but for cataloguing it has some shortcomings compared to digiKam. Most serious, at least for me, is that XnView doesn’t work with offine external drives. digiKam, on the other hand, allows searches of offline drives, showing the thumbnails and all the metadata. It even tells you which external drives the images are located on.
I made a video tutorial for my client on the basics of using digiKam if anyone wants to see it.
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I’m using structured tree of directory and don’t need any soft.
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I agree DigiKam is logically laid out and does a lot of things well. My only complaint is that it takes a while to open so you may want to find a lighter weight programme if you want to just quickly view your photos.
How long does digiKam take to open on your system? My system is a few years old and it takes about 8 seconds, using an SSD and the digiKam 7.6.0 appimage. For just viewing photos I use Geeqie, which starts up in about 2 seconds and is pretty much instantaneous in browsing a folder of images.
Even with several hundreds or thousands of images?
I haven’t timed it recently but certainly a lot longer than that, at least 30 sec. But I am on Windose 10 with 6 year old machine.
Yes, unfortunately it takes quite a long time to start digiKam, in about 8 sec. This is not so much, but to just quickly look at a photo, it is unfortunately much too long. I still use XnViewMP for quick viewing, that’s also good for looking through my videos, or Geeqie.
But, what digiKam can do is great, and I don’t know of any other software (for Linux) that can do nearly as much and is as good. However, as I said, you have to learn some things. But that is worth it in any case.
After dk indexes those folders, those numbers shouldn’t be a problem. There’s a setting somewhere to allow for constant indexing, though, which might slow things down if you have a lot of folders to keep track of.
I use Amazon Prime 
Dove posso trovare il video per l’uso di Digikam ? Sono interessato.
Grazie
I use EXIFtoolGUI and geosetter to write the metadata I am interested in to the images. When done I export the metadata to a text file (with EXIFtoolGUI) and import the text data into an EXCEL spread sheet, one line per image.
I am very reluctant to use any other archiving software, because no one knows how long these applications are supported (see what happened to Google’S Picasa). My assumption is that plain ASCII files live forever (and I always can export my EXCEL files into ASCII files).
Hermann-Josef
I am very reluctant to use any other archiving software, because no one knows how long these applications are supported (see what happened to Google’S Picasa). My assumption is that plain ASCII files live forever (and I always can export my EXCEL files into ASCII files).
With digiKam, you have the choice of keeping metadata in the DB, writing it to the file’s EXIF tags, and/or to XMP sidecar files.
While it might be a bit of a bother to get everything out of the DB, it’s standard SQL so absolutely doable. And EXIF and XMP are both supported by a lot of different software, so no issues there.
I was taking about the average DK user, who most likely is not able to deal with SQL. Reading the EXIF data is also not the issue. The user wants to use the data base to search and select. And this is not guaranteed beyond the life of all commercial software packages, as far as I can see.
Hermann-Josef