DigikamDAM

On the KDE Wiki there is an article about digital asset management with Digikam. It is quite long and covers general DAM topics as well and their realization with Digikam. From image downloading from cameras through sorting, rating, captioning, geotagging and cataloging, to archiving and backing up. It discusses the features of back-up medias and the main causes of data loss as well.

It covers both theory and practice, and is an interesting article to read, not only for Digikam users.

Part I

PartII

Geotagging 2

I tried the software QLandkarte, what is a graphical application for communicating with Garmin GPS units. It’s main feature (for me at least) is that it can send and receive maps to/from devices. (Its features makes it similar to the Garmin Mapsource)

It was not easy to set it up, because 0.5.2 precompiled from getdeb was unable to send maps (feisty64 package, my system is qutsy64) although, it was working fine for a friend (feisty32 package on gutsy32). Fortunately, there is a source package (0.5.3). But be sure to install its dependencies before compiling it, because the package has no autoconf script. Works great. Its usb-protocol is based on GPSBabel, so the module problem mentioned above can be an issue here too. Can send and recieve routes, tracks, waypoints and maps.

Geotagging

I do geocaching. And naturally, i make photos during my trips. So why not connect the two? What if I could tag my photos with the coordinates they where shot on? My camera does not have a built in GPS receiver, but that is no problem.

My GPS is a Garmin hand held device, with USB port. I’ve chosen GPSBabel, as it is said to work well with Garmin devices. Unfortunately, there is a little problem with USB modules, but a solution can be found here. Just a note: I did the Ubuntu Dapper solution, and had to restart after the editing/creating of the files. No kernel recompiling was necessary.

For USB capable Garmin devices, type in the following command:

$ gpsbabel -t -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F tracklog.gpx

This will download the tracks from the GPS to a file called “tracklog.gpx”.

The EXIF metadata section of a photo holds information on the creation time of the photos (among other things), (just make shure that the clock in your camera is adjusted well), so the time stamp of every photo is to be checked against the tracklog, and if a track point with the same time stamp exists, then the coordinates of the trackpoint are to be written to the GPS section of the metadata of the photo.

This is what GPS Photo Correlate does. And it comes with a GUI too. It is capable of interpolation between trackpoints, so if the time stamps are not exactly the same, it will correlate from the coordinates of two adjacent points for the time stamp of the photos. Really easy to use. The only flaw – for me – is that it seems to be unable to write to DNG files.