Geoff's Digicam Tools for Linux

Introduction

When I got my digital camera, I found that there was relatively spotty support for it under Linux. Some things were easy to do (e.g., displaying pictures), some were possible but inconvenient (e.g., rotating pictures 90 degrees), and some were very difficult or impossible. Over the next year, I located some software, modified some, and wrote some. This page contains the results of those efforts.

Notes on this software:

  1. This software is UNSUPPORTED. I do not have time to answer questions, fix bugs, or write further documentation. Sorry.
  2. There is currently no license on my own software. I consider my contributions to be too small to be worth a separate license. Note that xv is distributed under its own license.

Software You Will Need

I'm a big believer in not reinventing the wheel. To use the other software on my page, you will need to download and install the following (unless you have it already):

What I've Done

The above tools are very useful (as are some other things like The Gimp, but I wasn't satisfied. In particular, my "Exif tags" (the information appended by the camera, and read by metacam, above) weren't being preserved. Here's what I've done:

Changes to xv

I have long preferred the xv image viewer for looking at my images. It is fast and flexible, and the "presets" in its color editor (type "e") can be configured to correct the poor color balance of my camera (tip: try fiddling with the gamma values for the three colors). I extended it in a number of ways. To get my extensions, download the patches, apply them to the source with patch, and recompile and reinstall xv.

Unfortunately, the author of xv has disappeared so I can't get my changes integrated into the main code stream. Another side effect is that I can't patch the official documentation, since it was written with MS-Word and is not distributed in source form. So here's a summary of my changes and how to use them:

Stuff That's Missing

I'm still searching for Linux-based solutions to a few remaining problems relating to digital photos:


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