Digikam is a fairly easy to use application. When you load up Digikam for the first time (or upgrade from 0.5), you will get a popup window that tells you that the way that Digikam stores photos has changed. Digikam uses now a folder on your filesystem as an album library, meaning that every subfolder of this folder will be considered as a photo album and displayed in the album list on the left side of the main window. Simply set a path to the album library using this popup window. Doing this, the Digikam main window will be loaded with the album list on the left and the content of the selected album on the right side. You could see some albums in album list if you have choosen an album library with subfolders. If you have already folders where you keep your photos, you can copy them into the album library and they will be displayed as albums in Digikam. As soon as you add an album, it will be sorted chronologically based on the month/year it was last modified. Lot of times these dates don't match with the month/year when the pictures were actually taken. You can right click on an album and it will give you an option to change the album date. The right click menu will also provide you more options to change the title of the album, add comments or remove it from the index or delete it entirely.
Clicking on an album will start generating the thumbnails for the images in the album or if the thumbnails have already been generated, will load them from cache. You can change the iconsize to small, medium, large or huge from the magnify buttons in the toolbar (Also you can set the default iconsize you want when Digikam starts up. More on this in the setupwindow). Right Clicking on an item will give you a popup menu, using which you can view, rename, delete, see the exif information, and add/edit comments of the images. When you add comments to an image, they are shown below the filename in the thumbnailview. Double clicking on an item will open it up in the imageviewer.
