This is a landing page for hobby #1432 (photography). I'm admittedly not much of a photographer, but if you use Linux, or some other free Unix, and you're trying to figure out some workflow, or decide on tools, then something herein might help.

I happen to use Nikon gear, which I like very much. When I was doing the research to get my first SLR, I was heavily influenced by the weight of the camera, because my main concern was that I could carry it while hiking and/or backpacking. Nikon's D40 with kit lens was the lightest/cheapest new DSLR I could get my hands on at the time, so I jumped and never looked back. I now have two bodies, a d40 and a d90, and several lenses (from most expensive to least expensive) 24-70mm f2.8, 70-300mm f3.5-4, 18-55mm f3.5-4, and a “nifty fifty”. I also have the sb400 speedlight.

I recently made the leap from JPEG only to RAW when I had the epiphany that the high quality JPEGS from the D90 were nearly the size of RAW NEF's anyway. That realization caused me to evaluate whether RAW was really worth it in the most practical sense (will doing my own RAW conversions consistently make my photos noticeably better? (answer: YES!)), and was it was possible to create a RAW workflow on my Linux box that I wouldn't find too annoying. I'm pretty lazy when it comes to workflow stuff. I'm not a pixle-monkey, I use computers for automation, and I don't get paid for this, so I want to keep it fun. Photoshop is not my idea of fun. Anyway I now shoot RAW + JPEG Basic, and have a workflow that I'm basically happy with. That workflow is the real reason this page is here. It's detailed below.

I'm probably atypical when it comes to software compared to most people who describe themselves as photographers. Most real photographers these days commit all of their photos to database programs like aperture or lightroom, and then fiddle with them in aperture, lightroom, and photoshop. I've tried all of that and don't really enjoy it, so I don't do any of that stuff anymore. The most I'm going to do is tweak white-balance, saturation, and levels. If whatever's wrong with the photo can't be fixed with those three, I'm just going to toss it and go shoot more photos. Here are the pieces of software I do use now and a bit on why I like them.

No idea how to pronounce it, but geeqie is a fork of gqview that has retained everything I loved about gqview and added a ton of really useful features. It's categorized as an image viewer, and most people dismiss it as such, but I find it pretty much indespensible to my workflow. If there's another program out there that does what it does, I've yet to find it. Stuff I like about geeqie:

I can delete photos with the delete key. Rotate them with [ or ], enlarge with +, and skip to next with the spacebar. Geeqie never makes me touch the mouse.

Most image viewers will only go full screen in slideshow mode, and have limited functionality when in full screen mode. If I want to view an image fullscreen in geeqie, I hit 'f' and while I'm fullscreen, all of my other keybindings still work. I can't stress how important this stupid-sounding “feature” is if you shoot a lot in a vertical orientation.

This feature is the cornerstone of my photography workflow. In gqview it existed to make it possible to send a photo to something like gimp or photoshop. For example you could configure editor slot 1 as “gimp %f”, and when you hit ctl+1, gqview would launch gimp with the name of the currently selected photo. I used to use this feature to hook into my own scripts, to do things like use imagemagick to sharpen or saturate an image. My script would then use libnotify to tell me it was done running, or that it had a problem. In Geeqie, this feature is FAR more flexible, for example they've closed the feedback loop I just alluded to, giving you the ability to have your scripts talk back to you via geeqie hooks. This is a feature I've long wished for, but now that it's here, I confess I still use libnotify. Dear geeqie devs, I'll port my scripts to use geeqie verbose hooks when geeqie can grok error text ala libnotify's urgency feature.

nuff said.

Geeqie caches thumbnails and image data, making preview and playback of on-disk image collections as fast if not faster than database-driven programs like aperture. What's better, I can configure how the caches work.

ImageMagick is a set of command-line utilities for image editing. I use it in my shell scripts for anything that needs to happen to the photo after the Raw conversion. These sorts of changes include unsharp mask, and re-sizing for print or the web.

I use ufraw for raw conversion. It has a batch conversion mode that I find quite useful as I'll detail below.

If I find myself in the extraordinarily rare situation of wanting to edit an image manually beyond WB, Saturation, or levels, I use the Gimp.

As previously mentioned, I shoot simultaneously in raw and jpeg-basic (the lowest jpeg setting available on the camera). When I'm done shooting I remove the card from the camera, and place it in my thinkpad's built-in card reader. I then run my dlphotos script. The dlphotos script finds and mounts the sdcard, and for each jpg and nef it finds on the card, it:

• Parses the Exif data to find the date to the second the shot was taken
• Renames the file from something like DCIM_1234.JPG to 20100410_153024.jpg (YYYYMMDD_HHmmSS.jpg).
• If that name already exists (either camera is capable of taking multiple frames per second) it adds an ordinal to the name
• Creates a directory called 2010-04-10 to store the photo in (if it doesn't already exist)
• Moves the photo to the local HD

When it's done, it checks for movie files, and copies them over too, unmounts the card, and exits. The dated photos are stored in my home directory, in a “photos” directory. The NEF (RAW) version of 20100410_153024 is going to be in ~/photos/nef/2010-04-10/20100410_153024.nef, and the jpeg version is in