digiKam for the win!

I've been moving away from Apple, and really enjoying using Linux desktop. It is better in so many ways, and the latest joyful moment has been to find the wonderful open-source application called digiKam.

I am finally going to go through my digital equivalent of a box of wires, and for me that is my photos. Do I really need 40,000 photos or so that are in my Apple and Google photo library? No. I want to know what I've taken pictures of, and I don't want to rely on the AI 'memories' to surface up good photos.

So, what do I want to do? I want to import all my photos into a simple folder, open that in digiKam, and edit the names and metadata that makes sense to me going forward. In digiKam I easily grabbed 1,000 photos I took on a trip to Scotland and geotagged them to Scotland, UK. digiKam lets me do that in 3 clicks, and can write that metadata into the image.

Next, I want to batch rewrite my image file names in the same way Derek Sivers does, because it makes sense to me. First you name the file with the date, then a few words about what it is a picture of like... '2025-09-12 Sky at the beach.jpg'. Easy to do in digiKam! You can rename the file, select fields from the EXIF data or other metadata about the image, and even use their modifiers to do something like replace colons with hyphens like this:
[meta:EXIF.ExifIFD.Time.CreateDate]{replace:":","−"

I just clicked export on google takeout, and then I'll start this for the...gigs and gigs of photos, and I look forward to being delighted by seeing these photos, categorizing them, and seeing in digiKam's world view all the places they were taken. Give it a shot!