Photo Management: digikam-kphotoalbum-f-spot and Versioning

[gustafson]

Hi,

I hate to post yet another photo management software question but I'm just getting started in digital photography and want a good tool. After reading many forums and browsing many feature lists, I think I've settled on kphotoalbum or digikam, although f-spot has one feature that I like (versioning). However, I still have some questions.

Does anybody have experience with both, and if so, which is better? Which of these tools is better at embedding the tags into the actual files themselves? (Can this even be done in kphotoalbum?) Can either of these extract tags from the files and use them? This gets to the question of eventaully moving to different software if I need to do so, and or accepting pictures sent from other people.

Is there a recommended way of keeping versions of photos around. I saw that f-spot has something like this (it basically just keeps the original and creates a second file where the file name is appended with "modified". I'd like something a little more sophisticated than that (is more sophistication needed?). Ideally, I'd like to always have the original (perhaps eventually the raw file) of some photos stored somewhere, while doing all the cropping/recoloring I want. Also, I'd love to easily maintain working copies across the many machines I use.

I use subversion for many things but it seems to be an expensive tool (ie lots of disk space and slow) when used in conjunction with photography. (It at least doubles the disk space in the working copy, since it stores both the current revision and the working copy, irrespective of whether the working copy has changed [I think]. It also adds the repository storage, which when combined with the above almost quadruples to total disk space required. This is likely to get out of hand if I want to keep the raw file.) Is there a better tool?

Thanks in advance,

[coplaniuk]

I'm also very much into photography, and have been looking to depend more on linux over my windows partition. In windows, I used ACDSee...so I've been spoiled. In Linux...I've been exprimenting lately with Google's Picasa (a masked version is on the portage tree). I'm not sure if it handles versioning like you said...but I havn't tried. I always keep originals read-only and handle additional versions with filenames.
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[gustafson]

Thanks for your response.

I've tried picasa and think it is pretty good... however I'd prefer an open source solution. So far, I think the 2 I listed above are pretty reasonable in comparison to picasa, perhaps not as polished but almost as capable.

As I continue to think about it, the f-spot "modified" method isn't soo bad, however overall f-spot appears to be lagging some in feature content with respect to the others. (fwiw I've also found it's date based folder storage method to be in interesting way to consider storing my photos... I might keep playing with it for a while to determine if is worth switching over from named folders)