Migrating from iPhoto to DigiKam

For my photos I’ve been using, up to now, iPhoto. The reason for this is that the big part of my photo collection is actually composed of my sister’s photos, which I downloaded directly with the MacBookPro when she asked me.

On the other hand, I use way more often my Linux box, and while iPhoto is a nice tool, DigiKam is not bad either, so I’d gladly move everything on Enterprise, as the mobility option for the photos is lost already once I moved everything on the external harddrive (as I now have more than 10GB of photos).

Unfortunately this migration is not going to be painless I’m afraid, especially because there are a few features I might be losing, unless I can spend some time writing stuff on my own.

The first problem would be having a way to save the photos from risks of losing data; the quick way would be to put them in raid. At the moment the photos are backed up by TimeMachine too, so I don’t risk losing them. I don’t think putting them in my /home directory will be a good idea: it’s just 14GB and the photos will soon be over that quota. I wonder if LVM can mirror partitions easily.

Then there’s the cleanness of storing the photos on the iPod, I don’t think Amarok can load them, can it? I have to check that out. And having them on the AppleTV too.

On the Wiki there are instructions on how to set up a DPAP (Digital Photo Access Protocol, I suppose it’s a relative of DAAP) server to share the photos with iPhoto, and AppleTV. I have to check that out, maybe writing an ebuild.

Of course the easiest way to handle this would be to have DigiKam actually providing DPAP support 😉

Another point I’d like to address is Flickr uploading. To upload to Flickr at the moment I’m using the FlickrUploadr, as the only plugin to allow that in iPhoto is proprietary commercial software. kFlickr is better than FlickrUploadr, but still isn’t well integrated (can’t just select an Album and say “upload to Flickr”).

Probably some of these concerns will be addressed with the KDE 4 version of DigiKam, I expect that to happen, but now I’m wondering if I should migrate already or wait for those to be done…

On the other hand, I wonder if there is anybody working on reverse engineering the protocol with which iTunes talks to AppleTV, it would be nice to be able to just command it through Amarok or DigiKam.

/me adds stuff to his TODO, which is probably way too big for this to ever happen.

But I certainly hope someone will write this stuff for me 🙂 After all we all do our parts in the greater Free Software plan!