[digiKam-users] How to learn Digikamefficiently

[trparks1]

Hi,

I have undertaken a project to organize a large volume of images that include archival family prints and slides (now being commercially scanned) and personal and semi-pro digital images.  There are about 10K of the scanned images that should arrive in folders named in a format: YYYY_MM,Location_Or_Event,Person1,Person2,Person3,…

 

The digital media is another matter.  There are about 60K images in existing folders that are loosely organized by year and event/location, but include “raw” stock (not raw data format, but simply inclusive of all photos taken in that series), well curated collections (that may include images not in the raw stock), photos from my phone, ones received from friends/colleagues, etc.  Geeze, what a mess.

 

My goal is to have ultimately each file tagged with Date, Event/Location, People, in its meta data so that they can be efficiently filtered in the future regardless of platform.  I would also of course like to use the efficient database and other features of a platform such as DIgikam.

 

I have looked over photo related DAM software solutions and have boiled my choice down to Digikam

and Adobe Bridge.  I would very much prefer to use Digikam except I have not been able to find much in the way of efficient tutorial materials.  The program seems very powerful but also complex and finding the best way to approach my project and set up workflows (just for organizing) seems daunting to me.  I feel like I could spend a good deal of time just learning the basics and find myself with a lot of sunk time only to find that I didn’t have an efficient approach and perhaps even need to start over.

 

I would greatly appreciate any suggestion on how to steepen the learning curve so I could become efficient and productive within a reasonable amount of time (week or so).   I am more than willing to pay for a power users time to help me launch and get moving in the right direction if anyone out there is willing and qualified.

 

Thanks in advance,

Tom

[papertape]

To trparks1:
Fortunately you can work on your photo corpus 19 hours daily.  So your
one-week plan is feasible.  (Sorry... couldn't resist.)

Pardon the obvious: search YouTube for "digikam".  And search the web for
"digikam instruction".

Tagging your photos manually is straightforward, within the envelope of
photo managers, but assigning tags 70,000 times is a challenge.  You might
look at ExifTool.  It is command-line driven, so you can construct scripts.
(Yeah, I know, easy to say, but saying ain't doing.)  https://exiftool.org/

I tried Adobe Bridge's automatic analysis feature a couple of years ago, but
it was so whacky, I decided to label my negatives manually with Digikam.  I
have only about 2,000 negatives, though.

Cheer up; I remember seeing posts from people with 250,000 images.




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