dmitripopov's blog

Using digiKam? Show this to the world with some classy stickers from World Label. If you use digiKam to process and organize your photos, you have a chance to win 5 sheets (18 stickers each) featuring an original design. And you can download the template and print stickers yourself, too. Continue to read

While there are many ways to protect your photos from unauthorized use, watermarking still remains the simplest and probably the most effective technique that can help you to identify you as the creator and make it difficult to use your works without permission.

Although digiKam supports watermarking, this feature is hidden so well that you might not even realize that it’s there. This is because the watermarking function in digiKam is tucked under the Batch Queue Manager tool which you can use to watermark multiple photos in one go. Here is how this works in practice.Continue to read

Can’t wait till the latest version of digiKam appears in the official Ubuntu software repositories? You don’t have to: using the personal package archives (PPA) provided by the Launchpad service, you can install the latest release of digiKam with a few simple commands. Continue to read

digiKam offers several features that can improve photos containing under- or overexposed areas. For example, the Exposure Blending tool lets you merge multiple shots with different exposures into one perfectly exposed photo. But what if you have just a single image? In this case, you might want to give the Local Contrast feature a try. Continue to read

digiKam is an immensely powerful photo application, so learning all its features requires time and effort. But this capable photo management application also offers a few easy to use features which you can use to instantly improve your shots. Continue to read

Giving your photos meaningful names makes it significantly easier to keep tabs on them. Of course, renaming each and every photo by hand is not particularly practical, especially if you take dozens or even hundreds of photos each day. This is when digiKam's Rename feature can come in rather handy. You can use it to define rather advanced renaming rules and apply them to multiple photos in one fell swoop. Continue to read

Using digiKam's Kipi plugins, you can upload your photos to a variety of popular photo services, including Flickr, Picasaweb, and SmugMug. But what if you want to host your own photo album and still be able to populate it with photos directly from within digiKam? In this case, you might want to try Piwigo, a nifty photo application that has everything you need to host and share your photos on the Web. Continue to read

No matter how good your camera is, taking a well-exposed photo of a high-contrast scene like a black bird on snow can be really tricky. Even if you switch to the manual mode and tweak the exposure settings, there is still a risk that you will end up with a shot containing under- or overexposed areas. One way to solve this problem is to use exposure blending. This technique involves taking several shots of the same scene or subject with different exposures and then fusing these shots into one perfectly exposed photo. Continue to read

You will be forgiven for thinking that copyrighting photos belongs to the realm of the professional photographer. Even if you consider yourself an amateur, providing copyright and contact information for your photos is a prudent thing to do. Embedding copyright info into each photo may sound like a daunting proposition, but digiKam provides a nifty template feature which lets you create copyright templates and apply them to multiple photos in one go.

Hot on the heels of digiKam 1.0, Gilles Caulier announced the 1.1.0 release of the popular open source photo management application. While the main focus in version 1.0 was on squashing bugs, the new release of digiKam does sport a couple of new nifty features and improvements.