As an amateur photographer, you don’t need expensive software to manage your ever-growing photo collection. Recently the freeware digiKam has been upgraded to version 7 in which a lot of bugs have been fixed, and the software now also supports facial recognition.
digiKam
price
Free
Language
Dutch
OS
Windows, macOS and Linux
Website
www.digikam.org 6 Score 60 
- Pros
- Batch function
- Besides photos also manage videos
- Negatives
- Face recognition does not work optimally
- The structure looks somewhat outdated
On the homepage, choose to download the 64 or 32bit version. To begin with, make digiKam feel a bit nicer. On some computers digiKam does not immediately install the Dutch version, but you can change that via Configure Settings / Language. And if you’re not a fan of the light interface, you can change the look with Settings / Styles, so you get to a dozen skins with some nice dark renderings in between.
Tag, categorize, rate
The starting point of digiKam is album view. The photo management starts with tagging, possibly adding the geolocation, categorizing and rating. The tree structure in the left column always gives you an overview of all photos and from there you can browse through the different albums, locations, periods or people.
When the pictures taken With a device that supports geotagging, you will notice on the map from Google Maps or from Marble’s Virtual Globe that the software has already pinned the snaps to the correct location.
Photo editor and batch
digiKam includes an integrated photo editor to make minor adjustments to exposure, brightness and colors. The program has the tool Light table which is interesting to browse similar photos. You can compare the images before and after the correction side by side. Whether you compare by holding the mouse pointer over the image or not.
Handy is the batch processing with which you can rename and optimize a large number of images. With the job queue manager you can, for example, reduce image noise, sharpen images and add a border or a watermark.
Conclusion
We expect more and more from a photo manager and digiKAM has everything to create order out of chaos. In terms of tagging, creating albums and organizing, the program works very well. Only with the more advanced functions such as face recognition does the program go wrong.
