Digikam is Replacing Apple Photos, Google Photos and Amazon Photos For Me
Apple Photos is fine for backing up the pictures I take with my
iPhone, but its proprietary database that keeps users from accessing
their files except through the software is for the birds. A corrupt
photos library can cut you off from all your memories. I long used
Google Photos and Amazon Photos as secondary backups of not only my
iPhone photos, but also scans and the pictures I take with my DSLR.
Since I decided to stop doing business with big tech to the extent
possible (except Apple), I downloaded my collections from both
companies, consolidated them, removed the duplicates and began looking
for a management solution that has the features I want. After much
testing, I've decided to go with the free and open-source solution, Digikam It has been around for years
but is under active development. Version 8.6 was just released in March
2025.
Digikam easily loads my photo library, which contains nearly 100,000 images and over 420 albums, which are primarily collections of images from every month of this century. I can view my images as they appear in the file system, or group them according to tags, labels, geolocation or other metadata. Digikam eliminates the need for certain types of image utilities such as EXIF editors and duplicate photo finders because the functionality is built in.
It has robust export capabilities to photo management sites like Flickr, SmugMug, Google Photos and more. You can also send your collection to all the major US cloud storage companies like Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and more. You can also send images to social media sites as well. I wish it had WebDAV support, since I am using European cloud servers now.
Digikam makes it easy to for whatever your photo related workflow needs happen to be. If you are a photographer who needs to import an SD card from a day of shooting at an event, it can handle imports with batch edits and data processing using the same techniques as Lightroom. If you are someone like me with a large collection of digital images you want to curate, it has all the organizational tools you can think of. If you just want to have a nice way to look at your images, it has an easy-to-access slide show feature and the ability to scan and display any combination of folders or albums you select.
There are a couple of drawbacks. It's a huge program, weighing in at around 1 GB, mostly because it is packed with so many open sourced editing tools. My photos are in a folder that I sync between two computers, but I can't use a version of Digikam on more than one device because the path to the folder that holds my images is different since one is a Mac and the other is a Linux box. The facial recognition is good, but it's not as good as what Google Photos has which is so accurate it scares me. I'm glad I removed my data from their clutches.