Usually, an article like the one you're about to read would go something like this. First, I'll establish my credentials by telling you how many articles and books about open-source photography I've written. Then I'll tell you how much I rely on open-source software in my photography workflow and how much I appreciate the tools I use. And then there will be the inevitable but segue.
This clever tip was shared by Paul Marfell on the digiKam Users mailing list. To keep things tidy, digiKam makes it possible to stack related JPEG and RAW files on top of each other. Doing this manually is not that difficult, but if you have to do it dozens or even hundreds of times, that can quickly become a time-consuming and laborious endeavor.
Tags are great. But no matter how meticulous your are with tagging items in digiKam, you'll inevitably end up having multiple unused tags dangling around. Good thing then that the Tag Manager tool makes it easy to remove unused tags. In digiKam, choose Tag > Tag Manager, then choose Mark Unassigned Tags from the Organize drop-down list. This automatically selects all unused tags, and you can delete them by pressing the Delete selected items button.
Maybe because I'm not a coder to begin with, it never ceases to amaze me how much I can accomplish with just a few lines of PHP. Girasole PHP script is a case in point. It's so short and simple that it hardly deserves to be called an application. Yet it fulfills a huge need I've had for quite a while. It may have something to do with age, but the older I get, the more I appreciate the joy of reliving memories through my photos. I'm not keen on uploading my entire library to Google Photos or a similar service to make use of their "photos from the past" functionality. Because 1) pushing several terabytes of data would take forever and a day, 2) would be prohibitively expensive, and 3) I'm not enamored with the idea of entrusting my most private data to a third party, no matter how good their privacy protection track record is.
I've decided to get filthy rich by starting my own search engine. I mean, if Google and Microsoft can pull it off, so can I, right? And like any great artist, I started with stealing forking an existing project.
So far, I've been taking the code apart to learn how it works, removing stuff I don't need, and tweaking the overall appearance to my liking. Basically, because I don't know what I'm doing most of the time, I've been pulling an Elon Musk: I'd remove a chunk of code and check if the thing still works. Despite my efforts, the thing does seem to work, so ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gufo.