One important feature for photo management is missing in the FOSS world: an application for creating photo albums that can be sent away for printing at a printing service. There is however a pretty slick closed source application that works on linux. It can be fiound at for example Pixum (also in.nl and .de). It is based on Qt 4.4 and installs using a perl script which downloads the artwork and the required libraries. The application is customized for different printing companies that have these customized downloads available from their website. Not all of them offer the linux or even the macintosh version. This is a shame and probably done to limit the number of different questions users might have. A standard for these photo album ordering services would be great, but I’m not holding my breath and will recommend Pixum for now.
Comments
Printing
I would like to see printing companies to deliver somekind portfolio templates for those books, what could be converted to PDF templates for Scribus or even create own applications for that. I love digiKam and that is one feature what we are still missing for what is needed for many normal users. That (book priting) and the ordering just normal photos. That would need plugin API and allow printing companies to write plugins for that (or tell us the API's). As far many allows the FTP/Email transfer, but at least the later one is harder to use.
Need to discuss again about that printing thing for digiKam. It should be as easy than just selecting photos and order sizes. And get automatically tagged as ordered.
By fri13 at Sun, 10/25/2009 - 23:40