Photo-Workflow in Linux with Digikam

Well, this is not for Digikam alone.

You should con­sider this as a guide­line on how you can orga­nize your dig­i­tal pho­tos in Linux (and the other one as well ) I am far from say­ing that this is the only way to do it, but I can assure you that it works and has proven to be efficient.

Some peo­ple copy their files from the cam­era or the chip to a folder on the hard­drive — and that’s it. Some even don’t bother to work on copies of their orig­i­nal pho­tos and alter the orig­i­nals directly. To do that you must be either very good — or very stu­pid, because every mis­take is fatal. And if you don’t apply non-destructive pro­ce­dures there is no way back. Never.

But even if you have learnt the hard way that copies and back­ups (on exter­nal dri­ves prefer­ably) are good, you may won­der how to orga­nize your pos­si­bly grow­ing col­lec­tion. If you don’t take more than 10 shots a year, don’t waste your time, but if you shoot a lot more, please read on.

This is not going to be a tuto­r­ial on man­ag­ing tags and key­words and Exif– and IPTC-data. I just decribe my way of orga­niz­ing my files on filesystem-level. This is only the first step. Of course I also tag my files and use the var­i­ous tools in Digikam to sort, select, gather pho­tos by dif­fer­ent cri­te­ria. But even if I did not have these, I’d still be able to find quickly what I am look­ing for.

Three things are important:

1. I keep my raw data apart from the work-data. I even have them on phys­i­cally dif­fer­ent dri­ves, so that in case on HD kicks the bucket, the other files are not con­cerned. I make sep­a­rate back­ups of them.

2. I keep the sql-database of Digikam apart from both the raw-files and the work-files and do not save it on the same drive. I make a sep­a­rate backup of it as well.

3. Once my raw pho­tos are copied to a disk, they are untouch­able. I always work with copies.

Yes, this means that I “waste” some space on my hard­drives. But hey, if there is one thing that has become really cheap, it is disk-space. And redun­dancy is your friend. It means safety.

SESO! Save early, save often!

— Me

Also I like to sort my files not only by year/date, which is suf­fi­cient for the orig­i­nals, but addi­tion­ally by the intended use: web, print  etc., as this also deter­mines, in which size/resolution/fileformat I save them. Again this means that sev­eral vari­a­tions of a file exist side by side — but in dif­fer­ent sub­fold­ers. It makes sense, as for exam­ple the gallery in my blog requires a dif­fer­ent width/height than that on Deviantart or Flickr. For some I add frames, for oth­ers not. And of course prints need a  much higher resolution/dpi than pic­tures for mere web-use. You get the idea…

To make the han­dling in Digikam eas­ier, I pre­fer not to main­tain one big col­lec­tion with all files in it, but cre­ate sev­eral collections/albums accord­ing to what the pho­tos are used for.

Sounds com­pli­cated? It isn’t, I assure you. The fol­low­ing dia­gram should be easy to read and understand.

Don’t worry, if you use the import-tool of Digikam to down­load the files from your cam­era, it can cre­ate all nec­es­sary folders/subfolders for you auto­mat­i­cally. Really easy.

ps. When I used the term “raw”, I did not only think of unedited pho­tos, but had the tech­ni­cal for­mat of the files from your cam­era in mind. If it allows you to I urge you to set your cam­era to raw-mode and not rely on jpg. Yes, the indi­vid­ual file will be a lot larger and it takes addi­tional steps to edit them, but the results are worth it. Think of a raw-file as a “neg­a­tive” like in the good old days. It con­tains all the data avail­able — and not only those an engi­neer from your camera-factory thinks to be necessary.

Ques­tions? Feel free to ask…