Alternatives for Shotwell on KDE

Question

For various reasons I have recently converted from Ubuntu Unity to KDE (Kubuntu). I have found suitably integrated solutions for most of the applications I used to use under Unity on my new KDE installation. All except for Shotwell.

The feature I miss, specifically, is to import all photos from a camera into various folders based on date. If, for example, photos were taken today, the 15th of August 2012, using Shotwell, they would be imported to the folder ~/Pictures/2012/08/15/. New folders for each year are automatically created by Shotwell and within each year, one for each month, and within each month a folder for each day.

I have tried both Gwenview and digiKam on KDE, but I have been unable to set it up so they import the photos into these automatically created date-based folders.

I realize that I can just continue using Shotwell (which I am), but I miss the integrated popups and such that I had when using Shotwell on Unity.

Can anyone help me find a KDE application that is suitably integrated that can do this?

Answer 1

The only application that is able to do what you want regarding the folder structure is the rapid-photo-downloader, which is available in the repositories. It is obviously an importer program, rather than a photo viewer, although you can view pictures in it as they are imported. As the screenshot shows, it has more options than any other program for controlling how pictures are imported. It can download your pictures into exactly the folder structure that you want and perform many other tasks such as renaming and reorganising your photos.

However, it is very important to note that it works best when your camera card is put in a card reader, as it works every time when that is done, but does not always recognise your camera as a device for import when you connect it directly.

For more information on the feature set of the program, see this site.

If you want a more recent version than that in the repositories, as some of the latest versions contain a lot of bugfixes and improvements, you could use the following PPA, which I have used for a while:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dlynch3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rapid-photo-downloader