Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
digiKam Recipes 3.9.51 Released
A new version of the digiKam Recipes ebook is available for your reading pleasure. Besides a few minor tweaks, the new version of the digiKam Recipes ebook includes the following new material:
- Use Photoshop Curve Presets with digiKam
- Import Photos from a Remote Server into digiKam
digiKam Recipes in FBReader for Android
Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com, and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.
Happy reading!
Geotag Photos with Android Camera and digiKam
Thanks to digiKam’s geocorrelation capabilities, you can geotag photos using a GPX file created with apps like Open GPS Tracker. But there is also another way to use your Android device for geotagging. The built-in camera app of most Android devices is capable of geotagging photos. This means that you can take a geotagged snap with the Android camera and then transfer geographical coordinates from it to other photos using digiKam. So next time, when you are done shooting with your main camera, remember to take a reference snapshot with your Android device (make sure that the geotagging option is enabled).
Copying geographical coordinates
In digiKam, select the reference snapshot along with the photos you want to geotag and choose Image → Geo-location. Right-click on the reference snapshot in the selection list and choose Copy coordinates. Mark then the rest of the photos in the list, right-click on the selection, choose Paste coordinates, press the Apply button, and you are done.
Stitch Panoramas in digiKam
Being a do-it-all kind of application, digiKam is suited not only for performing the mundane tasks of organizing and editing photos. The application also offers a specialized tools for more advanced operations: from blending bracketed photos to stitching panoramas. The latter functionality in digiKam is implemented as a Kipi plugin which relies on Hugin, a set of powerful tools for processing photos and stitching them into panorama images. The plugin wraps Hugin features into a user-friendly interface which dramatically simplifies the process of turning multiple photos into a panorama.
Obviously, to make use of digiKam’s panorama stitching capabilities, you have to install Hugin software on your system. Hugin is available in the software repositories of many mainstream Linux distributions, so you can install it using your distro’s package manager. On Debian and Ubuntu, this can be done by running the apt-get install hugin command as root. To install Hugin on Windows, grab the installer from the project’s website.
Stitching a panorama with Panorama Tool
Stitching panoramas in digiKam is a pretty straightforward process. Select the photos you want to stitch, and choose the Tools → Stitch images into a panorama command. This opens the Panorama Tool which guides you through the process of generating a panorama which consists of a few relatively simple steps. Each step lets you specify several settings, like the output format (JPEG or TIFF) and the ability to detect moving skies. You can also enable the horizon leveling and automatic projecting and crop options. To view brief descriptions of the available options and settings, hover the mouse over them. Once the Panorama Tool has finished stitching images, it prompts you to save the project file. Using this file, you can reprocess the photos in Hugin, if needed.
Pygmyfoto 1.3.7 Released
Besides minor tweaks and fixes, the latest release of Pygmyfoto features a couple of significant changes. The Python script that took care of processing photos and pushing data to the pygmyfoto.sqlite database has been replaced with a Bash shell script which does the job with less code. This means, among other things, that Pygmyfoto has fewer dependencies.
Version 1.3.7 also provides integration with OpenStreetMap. Geotagged photos can now be viewed on OpenStreetMap via a dedicated link.
Photos can now be easily published and unpublished using the dedicated links.
The new version of the application also does away with the Google+ button and adds a simple view counter. The source code and a neatly packaged archive containing the latest release of Pygmyfoto are available in the project’s GitHub repository. A demo of Pygmyfoto is available at dmpop.dyndns.org/pygmyfoto
digiKam Recipes 3.9.39 Released
A new version of the digiKam Recipes ebook is available for your perusal. Besides the usual round of tweaks and fixes, the new version of the digiKam Recipes ebook includes the following new material:
- Geotag Photos with Android Camera and digiKam
- Stitch Panoramas in digiKam
digiKam Recipes in FBReader for Android
Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com, and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.
Happy reading!
Manage Photos with gThumb
gThumb may look like yet another image viewer, but behind its unassuming appearance hides a rather capable application that can help you to manage photos efficiently.
As any decent image viewer, gThumb provides all essential tools for browsing images and performing basic operations, such as rotating and resizing graphics files, converting images to different formats, and tweaking EXIF metadata. If you use tags to keep tabs on your photos, you’ll appreciate gThumb’s tag editing feature. To quickly assign one of the existing tags to a specific photo, right-click on it and choose the desired tag from the Tags menu. Choose the Other item to add new tags and assign them to the photo. To specify additional metadata, press the Comment button on the main toolbar, and fill out the available fields.
gThumb
gThumb allows you to group photos into so-called catalogs (you can think of them as virtual folders), and the Organize button lets you generate catalogs based on several criteria, such as dates and tags. You can also create custom catalogs and add photos to them manually. To create a new catalog, right-click on the Catalogs item in the navigation pane, choose the Create Catalog command, give the catalog a descriptive name and press Create. Add then photos to the catalog by right-clicking on them and choosing the catalog from the Add to Catalog menu.
gThumb features a handful of basic editing tools
The application also features a handful of basic editing tools. To access them, double-click on a photo, and press the Edit file button in the top-right corner of the editing interface. While gThumb won’t replace a dedicated image editing application, the available tools can come in handy for quickly tweaking basic settings like brightness, saturation, and contrast as well as adjusting white balance and fixing common problems.
The Share button on the main toolbar lets you upload photos to several popular photo sharing services, including Flickr, Picasaweb, and Photobucket.
These are just a few highlights, and gThumb offers a slew of other useful features which make it a competent tool for managing and tweaking photos (take a look at a list of gThumb’s features to get a better idea of its capabilities). So if you are looking for a fast, lean, and feature-rich image viewer, gThumb fits the bill rather nicely.
Pygmyfoto 1.0 Released
Version 1.0 of Pygmyfoto, a no-frills application for publishing a photo roll on the web, is now available on GitHub. The first stable release features a handful of new features and improvements added since the latest beta version of the application. The older 1.2.3 version of jQuery bundled with the beta release has been replaced with jQuery 1.7.2. The jQuery lightBox plugin has been replaced with the Lightbox2 plugin. The pygmyfoto.py script features improved handling of EXIF metadata. Pygmyfoto now integrates the +1 button which can be used to share the published photos on Google+.
Pygmyfoto 1.0
Probably the most important improvement in Pygmyfoto 1.0 is the addition of the auto-pygmyfoto.py script which automatically processes photos placed in the uploads directory. Using this script, combined with a cron job, you can publish photos by simply putting them into the uploads directory.
Pygmyfoto 1.0 and its latest source code is available in the project’s GitHub repository. A demo of the latest version of Pygmyfoto is available for your viewing pleasure at
http://dmpop.homelinux.com/pygmyfoto/
.
digiKam Housekeeping with the Maintenance Tool
Starting with version 2.6, digiKam features the Tools → Maintenance menu which gives you access to tools designed to perform a variety of housekeeping tasks: from scanning for new photos to running a face recognition action. Here is a brief overview of the available tools.
Maintenance dialog
Scan for new items This command scans the collections for newly added photos. By default, digiKam does that automatically on every start. But if you’ve disabled this feature to speed up digiKam, you can use the Scan for new items tool to add new photos manually.
Rebuild thumbnails If, for some reason, thumbnails in albums are missing or broken, you can use this tool to fix them. To speed up this action, enable the Scan for changed or non-cataloged items option. This will ignore photos which have already been processed and catalogued.
Rebuild fingerprints digiKam uses fingerprints for certain search actions, and this tool allows you to generate or rebuild fingerprints. Enable the Scan for changed or non-cataloged items option to skip the already processed and cataloged photos.
Find Duplicate Items Need to find duplicate photos? This command can help you with that. Note that this action uses fingerprints, so you might need to run the Rebuild Fingerprints action prior to using this tool.
Sync image metadata with Database When digiKam adds new photos, it automatically reads metadata from each photo and writes them into its database. The Sync image metadata with Database tool does the opposite: it reads metadata from the database and writes them into photos or into so-called XML sidecar files. This feature can come in handy in many situations. You can use it, for example, to back up metadata from the database to XML sidecar files.
Face Detection This tool finds photos containing faces and attempts to recognize person or persons in each photo. (see the Face Recognition article for more info.)
Pygmyfoto Goes Beta
In my spare time, I work on a a simple photo roll publishing application called Pygmyfoto. Since the project’s launch, I’ve been working steadily on adding features and improving Pygmyfoto.
Pygmyfoto
Besides a handful of interface tweaks, the current version of the application features several major improvements.
- A dedicated navigation menu makes it easier to move around Pygmyfoto.
- The application now uses the jQuery lightBox plugin to display photos. This offers a much better way to showcase your photographic masterpieces.
- A new search feature can be used to display photos that match a specific tag.
- Each photo now has a permalink which points to a separate photo page.
- The pygmyfoto.py processing script has better error handling, among other tweaks and improvements.
All key functionality has been implemented, so Pygmyfoto now enters the testing stage. A demo of the latest version of Pygmyfoto is available for your viewing pleasure, and you can grab the latest source code distribution from the project’s GitHub repository.
Export Photos to Wikimedia Commons with digiKam
Sharing is caring, and there is probably no better way to share your photographic masterpieces with the world than adding them to the Wikimedia Commons pool. While the project’s website features its own tool for uploading photos, digiKam’s Wikimedia Export Kipi plugin can come in rather handy when you need to export multiple photos in one fell swoop without leaving the convenience of your favorite photo management application.
Using the Wikimedia Commons Kipi plugin
The plugin can be evoked by choosing the Tools → Export to Wikimedia Commons command. If you don’t see the command in the menu, then you are either using an older version of digiKam (the plugin has been introduced in version 2.6) or the plugin has not been enabled. In the latter case, you can activate the plugin by choosing Settings → Configure digiKam. Switch then to the Kipi Plugins section and enable the Wikimedia Export plugin. Before you start using the plugin, you should also create an account with Wikimedia Commons.
Using the plugin to upload photos to Wikimedia Commons couldn’t be easier. Select one or several photos in a digiKam album and choose Tools → Export to Wikimedia Commons. This opens the export dialog window. In the Wiki field, type the URL of Wikimedia Commons API (
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/api.php
). Enter then your user name and password in the appropriate fields and press Log In. In the Information section, specify the author’s name and choose a license. If you want to resize photos before uploading them to Wikimedia Commons, check the Resize photos before uploading check box, and adjust the quality and size settings. Hit the Start Upload button, and the plugin takes care of the rest.
