digiKam can perform the following batch tasks: Border: create a border around your photos. Color: changes the colors of your photos using effects, including normalize, fuzzy, and monochrome. Convert: converts photos into several formats, including JPEG, PNG, and TIFF. Filter: sharpen, despeckle, blur, and many other filtering options. Rename: more than just simple file renaming, this includes date format flags and sequential numbering. Recompression: get higher quality, better compressed JPEG, PNG, TIFF, or TGA files. Resize: for those web photo sharing sites, resizing multiple images will come in handy. RAW converter: converting raw photos directly from a camera.
In addition, standard editing features can be applied to multiple images. These include: converting images to black and white, rotate, flip, EXIF data, and others.
The procedure for batch editing is essentially the same for all operations:
Select the images in the album you want to edit. To do this, hold Ctrl and highlight the appropriate images, or if they are not all in a row, click the “plus” icon in the top left that appears when hovering over the thumbnail. To select all photos, press Ctrl-A.
Click “Tools” (or “Images” depending on the task) and then select one of the batch options in the bottom segment of the menu.
A window will appear, and at the top, there should be a drop-down menu. Select the effect you want to apply.
Choose any options available.
At this point, you can also add or remove more images with with buttons on the right.
Select the destination folder.
Choose the overwrite mode. The default is “rename”. Use the others with caution.
Click “Start” To edit multiple sets of files, you can use the Batch Queue Manager found in the second section of the “Tools” menu.
In “Queue Settings”, select the the target folder you want to use. You can also change behavior and file renaming settings.
In the main digiKam window, select the photos you want to use and drag them over to the queue manager window.
In the “Batch Tools Available” section, select the tools you want to execute. Right click on each one you want and click “Assign Tool”. You may assign more than one.
Click on each tool in the “Assigned Tools” section. To the right, you will see “Tool Settings”. Edit settings for the tools as you see fit.
Click “Run” to start the processes. During that time, you can return to the normal Digikam window until the batches are done. digiKam can be very useful for editing photos, especially if you have a large number of images to deal with at once. The renaming functions and folder selection allow you to experiment without damaging the original copies. digiKam is free and open source software released under the GNU GPL. It is part of the KDE project and is available for Linux and Mac OS X. Most Linux distributions carry digiKam and the Kipi plugins package in their repositories.
