[PLUG] Digital photo selection and management software

[Mayuresh]

Thought these tools may be of your interest:

1. ImageMagick for batch mode touch up of photographs:

There is an image transformation called "Normalize" that normally does a 
fairly good job of enhancing an image. (May not necessarily yield a better 
looking image for each photograph though for majority of photographs the 
transformation is useful.)

ImageMagick (which should come by default with most distros) provides a way to 
do this transformation in a batch mode.

If you are interested in processing photos in bulk this helps.

(Command for this is mogrigy -normalize See man page for details)


2. jhead, jpegtran

Not all softwares interpret the EXIF flag that tells about the orientation of 
the image. Such software renders a vertically taken photograph horizontally.
jhead can help check this flag while with jpegtran you can rotate the image to 
make it renderable without worrying about EXIF flag.

One can wrap above 2 tools in a shell script and use as a pre-processor for 
photographs.


3. Organizing photos, Slideshow etc

I like digikam as it provides a nice repository for photographs. OpenGL 
transitions etc. look cool in the slideshow.

However if your album includes mpegs, they don't appear in slideshow 
automatically. There are no thumbnails shown for mpegs either.

Gimageview is another good software that lets you organize mpegs and jpegs 
together. But I noticed several problems with it.


4. Creating mpegs of slideshows with nice transition effects, subtitles, 
background sound if you like etc and burning it on VCD etc.

All these things work really well and it's really cool to watch your albums as 
VCDs on your TV set. I use SSMM for this which is unfortunately available 
only on Windows though it's free. Haven't yet come across something as 
powerful as that on Linux. (Wait before shooting at me. I'd appreciate any 
pointers for equivalent Linux tools. But please do take a look at amazing 
transition effects available in SSMM before deciding that it is equivalent!)


(Apologies for a longish post.)
Mayuresh.