Over the years I have accumulated quite a collection of cameras, starting with my 35MM Pentax and more recently an Exilim. The attic has a lot of old photographs that need sorting, when the time permits. The world has moved on and now I have DVD after DVD of pictures that also need to be sorted.

The wife was starting to miss her photo albums when we went digital, so I started to burn them onto Video CD's a few years ago, only to find my DVD player did not know how to play them. Then DVD burners became affordable, so we made the switch. Nowadays we have full blown moving picture slide shows with panning and zooming just like the pros, complete with music.

The MythTV media centre contains all the photo archives, so we can show friends and family when they come round. The problem is, we also have friends and family all over the world, many of whom have never been to Acacia Close, and we want to share our pictures with them also. The answer to all our needs has finally been answered with Flickr.

Flickr also can be set up as one of your information centre web pages inside MythTV.

Photo importing
You should be able to just plug in your digital camera or flashcard reader into a USB port and SUSE will locate it and create an icon in your Media directory accessable via Konqueror. This is typically labled as "Sanvol". You can then drag and drop them to your directory of choice. Photo applications such as F-Spot will locate these photos automatically and allow you to copy them into your preferred directory.

KDE Konqueror has excellent photo handling built into it, such as image preview, HTML album geenration as well as instant viewing and editing. Konqueror will also automatically detect duplicate file names and auto suggest new filenames so that you dont overwrite exisitng phots with new ones.

Photo viewing
You can view photos directly via Konqueror or many of the applications standard with SUSE. I do find that the Linux based applications render photos much nicer than the windows default apps, especially when the pictures have to be scaled up or down to fit the screen. They just seem much crisper and have much more fine detail, probably due to more advanced scaling techniques.

Nokia Ovi
A new portal for managing your on line life was released by Nokia in 2008. You can now sync your photos video, mail, calendar,games,music across both your personal and business life. I have started to migrate my photos to Ovi's share portal, as it allows me to upload content direct from my Nokia N95 the moment I take the picture or video.
Ovi has a Java bulk uploader integrated into the portal. To get it to work you will need to

1. Unistall the Open JDK "Iced Tea" packages
2. Install the latest 1.6.11 JRE

You can do this from inside YaST very easily.

Flickr
Flickr is very cool for sharing photos with your friends all over the world. Saves clogging up mailboxes. It is basically a photo sharing portal, but adds Blogs and RSS feeds to the pictures.You can load your photos using the jUploadr in  SUSE, have a look at the tab above.

Photo Management Applications
The two best tools I have found for managing photos isF-Spot for Gnome based desktops, and digiKam for KDE desktops. F-Spot also has a Flickr exporter built into it. digiKam has an optional plugin for Flickr exporting. My preference has been to use jUploadr, as it is even better than the stock windows Flickr uploader, and you can drag and drop photos straight out of Konqueror the KDE file and web browser.

A good guide beginners for F-Spot is Here.

You might also want to try out Googles new Picassa Photo tool

I'm now finding that I dont really need to use any local applications for managing and storing photos, as I can do all of this inside Flickr, and with the professional membership they provide enough storage for all my needs, and I can access my pictures from work,home and play. Flickr uses a new web programming paradigm called AJAX, which delivers a richer more responsive user experience for web based applications.

Photo Manipulation
In the windows and Macintosh world the preferred applicaton for manipulating photos and pictures is Adobe Photoshop. While we have had a very powerful image manipulation application in Linux called the GIMP, it is less than user friendly to say the least. The good news is that we now have a Photoshop like user interface layered onto the GIMP to make the transition easiser. Try out Gimpshop .

Things to come

Panoramas making

Batch Processing

Printing

Slide show

DVD movies from Photos