Starting out organized is the key to managing large photo archives sanely. When you study digital photography you'll hear "workflow" mentioned a lot. This covers post-processing chores, which take place after you take your pictures. That's right, snapping your pics is just the first step. Then the real fun begins: downloading them to your PC, organizing, editing, printing, or making online photo galleries. Digikam has some nice tools for managing your photo collections, so today we'll learn how to do that. Next week we'll dive into photo editing.

While most digital cameras can be connected directly to a PC to download photos, I think it's better to use a USB card reader. They're inexpensive, around $20 or less, and usually a lot faster.

Digikam first creates thumbnails from your camera card. Then you select which images to download. Ctrl+left-click selects one at a time, Shift+left-click selects batches at a time. Images -> Select New Items is a quick way to find only new images that have not been downloaded already. Or just select "Download all." Then you get a nice dialog that lets you download your photos into an existing directory, or create a new one.

Once that is finished, close the download window and remove your camera card to prevent accidents. Open the directory containing your new pics, and Digikam again flings up a page of thumbnails. You can easily change the size of the thumbnails with the View menu. Click once on a thumbnail to open or close the image. You may also open an image, then navigate through your images with the little arrows on the bottom right.

Next: Tagging and Albums »