penk

Today I am full of Mad Love for DigiKam, the photo manager distributed with KDE. I've been using it off and on for a few years, and for one reason or another, I would stray away and use manual file copies for a while.

As of about a year ago though, I've moved to using it full time for managing the (sometimes hundreds) of pictures I take in a given session. There's a whole slew of wonderful functions in it, but the ones that made me finally stick with it can be summed up as follows:

Automatic directory creation and sorting when importing from the camera. Directories can be created according to the date the picture was taken (importing 250 pictures from my camera may make 4 directories, if I was shooting over several days)
Direct support for my Canon 400D. When I plug in the USB, KDE prompts me to start Digikam, and everything is imported.
Full support for Exif data, including image orientaton, etc. Exif data is never removed or 'flushed' from the images.
Excellent export functionality to either Flickr or to a series of HTML files and thumbnails.
Very good gallery organization, sorting, and previewing. I can work with thousands of images and sort them into appropriate directories.
Tagging allows sorting and categorizing of images without reordering the directories. Searching for tags, dates, or other data generates a new view based on the tag criteria.
Easy calling of external programs such as The Gimp for post-processing.