Thinking About Switching to digiKam (My Notes for You All)
Lately I’ve been trying to sort out a long-term plan for managing all my photos and videos. I’ve got files spread over multiple drives, some of them not even plugged in most of the time, and I want a system that lets me browse and organize everything without relying on the internet or cloud services. Privacy matters to me, and I don’t want a program sneaking anything online.
After doing some research, digiKam keeps coming up as the strongest option. It’s completely offline. No accounts. No background sync. It runs even if you disconnect the internet entirely. It also remembers files on drives that aren’t plugged in, which is important for me because I bounce between different storage devices.
One thing I wanted to understand was how much space the program itself uses. The answer: not much compared to the actual photos. The database (tags, metadata, all the catalog stuff) is usually a few hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes. Thumbnails and previews take more, but even then, most people end up with maybe 3–12GB total. That’s nothing compared to a photo archive of hundreds of gigs or terabytes.
What makes digiKam interesting is that you can put all of that—database, thumbnails, previews—on a separate drive. It doesn’t have to live on your main system drive at all. So if you want redundancy (like I do), you can store the main database on one drive and clone it to another.
For comparison:
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Mylio tries to be offline-friendly but still has sync features built in, and that’s not what I want.
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ImageRanger is good but not 100% open-source, and I prefer something transparent.
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FastStone and XnView MP are also fully offline, but they don’t have the same level of deep metadata support. For big archives, digiKam feels more future-proof.
So, at this point, digiKam looks like the strongest choice for my setup: private, fast, and works with disconnected drives. I’m still thinking it through, but this is where my research is pointing me.
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