Looking for an picture management program - ideas please.

[H.S.]

Chris G wrote:
> Now the big issue is that I want to be able to sort these directories
> containing the images in chronological order.  This basically requires
> either that the program allows me to add some sort of property to an
> image directory indicating its date or it allows me to sort the
> directories manually.

What I do in this situation is to save each album (photos on one topic 
or of one trip) in a directory whose name is based on the starting date 
of the photos. For example, if I took pictures of an event starting the 
10 of July of this year, I would save the photos in 
20080710-photos-topic (ISO format, yyyymmdd). This format always gives 
me chronological order if sorted alphabetically.


> Even if I use numbers for the months (01 - Jan, 02 - Feb, etc.) it's
> not a perfect solution because different directories for the same
> month will still not be sorted correctly (e.g. April above).

If you are taking digital pictures, one of the solutions could be name 
the files based on their dates of creation using their exif information. 
And then to put those in an appropriately named folder.

> 
> Does anyone know of an image viewing/editing/managing program that
> provides this sort of organisation?  At the moment I'm using digikam
> which is close to what I want but doesn't provide the chronological
> sorting I want within its folder structure.
> 

Digikam came to mind, but you are already using that. I think it will 
serve your purpose if you name your folders a bit carefully (see above). 
Having said that, you might want to look in to some other photo 
management tools in Linux. Some are listed here:
$> apt-cache  search photo management
dfo - Desktop Flickr Organizer for GNOME
digikam - digital photo management application for KDE
digikam-doc - handbook for digikam and showfoto in several languages
f-spot - personal photo management application
flickcurl-utils - utilities to call the Flickr API from command line
gallery - a web-based photo album written in php
kflickr - KDE application to upload photos to Flickr
kipi-plugins - image manipulation/handling plugins for KIPI aware programs
libflickcurl-dev - C library for accessing the Flickr API - development 
files
libflickcurl0 - C library for accessing the Flickr API
libflickcurl0-dbg - C library for accessing the Flickr API - debugging 
symbols
lphoto - digital photo manager
pycocuma - Pythonic Contact and Customer Management
texlive-latex-extra - TeX Live: LaTeX supplementary packages
zoph - Web based digital image presentation and management system


Good luck!