digiKam
Free photo library for sorting, tagging and searching a big picture collection, with an editor built in.
Our verdict
digiKam is the app for people whose photo problem is organising rather than editing. If you came from Windows Photos or a shoebox of folders and want tags, albums, ratings, face recognition and proper searching, this is the one.
It leaves your pictures where they are, in normal folders, and keeps its own index alongside. That means nothing is locked away and you can still back up by copying the folder. Raw files are handled, and there is a capable editor inside if you only need the occasional crop or exposure fix.
Set aside an evening. The first scan of a big collection takes hours, and the interface throws more panels at you than Windows Photos ever did. There is also no phone app and no automatic cloud backup, so you still need a plan for that.
What's good
- Handles very large collections, tens of thousands of photos, without falling over
- Face recognition and tagging so you can find pictures of one person
- Reads raw files and includes an editor, so you may not need a second app
- Free, with your photos staying in ordinary folders on your own disk
What to know first
- Busy interface with far more buttons than Windows Photos ever showed you
- First scan of a large collection takes a long time
- Face recognition is less accurate than Google Photos
- No phone app or automatic backup of its own
The details
- Cost
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (GPL-2.0)
- How you install it
- App store (Flatpak), AppImage download, .deb installer, .rpm installer, Built-in app store
Windows apps it can replace
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