How to add applications to Digikam’s “open with” menu
The photo management application for KDE, Digikam, can read most (all?) raw camera formats, making it a very useful tool for cataloguing collections of raw files. To make your workflow run smoothly, you need to be able to open files in your preferred raw conversion software from within Digikam, which might need a bit of setup. It took me ages to find this online, so I’m posting it here in the hope that others might find this useful. I’ll use the example of adding Bibble Pro, a raw converter that is available for linux. The executable name is bibblepro.
To make bibblepro show up in the open with menu, we have to tell KDE that we want to use this program to open raw photo files. To do this we need to use the KDE system settings tool. In (k)ubuntu 8.10, we run the command systemsettings. In other distributions I believe it’s called kcontrol.
Within the system settings tool go to File associations. You might need to click on the Advanced tab. Click to expand the Image section of the Known Types on the left and select the raw file type you need to open (e.g. x-pentax-pef for Pentax raw files). Check that the Filename Patterns box contains the correct extensions (.pef and .PEF for Pentax raw files). In the Application Preference Order box you can see the list of applications that KDE knows can open .pef files. Click the Add button and type the name of your application in the box (e.g. bibblepro) then click OK. You should now see the application listed in the Application Preference Order box. Close the system settings tool and restart Digikam. Right click on a raw file of the type you specified, and you should see the new application in the Open with menu.
If you need to work with raw files of several different types, you’ll need to add the application to the Preference Order box for several different entries in the Known types.
May 2nd, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Well, it does add BibblePro to the right click “open with” menu, but although it does open Bibble it doesn’t focus on the selected image but at the fist image of the last opened folder within Bibble. I don’t know if this just happening to me.
I running Gnome 2.24.2
Digikam is great as a DAM, and also has good image editing tools but it lacks of the “Persistent Options” of Bibble (or other RAW processing programs as Photoshop). You can’t just tweak your RAWs without have them to be exported to png or other format to save the changes, or return to the RAW to see what tweaks you have applied.
Bibble sucks at DAM, but love the pluggins and the “persistent options” feature.
May 3rd, 2009 at 12:16 am
Doc,
I’m actually getting the same behaviour using 0.10 – maybe something changed between the rc and the release versions. I’ll put up a post if I find a workaround. Have you tried the new release preview of Bibble 5? I’ve only had a quick look at it, but it looks like it might have enough DAM ability to replace digikam for me (while still not doing quite exactly what I want – it refuses to write metadata to the raw files themselves). I highly recommend you take a look if you haven’t done so – it’s also much quicker and more stable (for me at least; I know that other people have reported trouble).
October 7th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Hello,
Thanks for tip!
I wanted to open JPG files within DigiKam, and the “Filename Patterns” for image/jpeg files was only “.jfif”, so I just added “.jpg”, “.jpeg”, “.JPG”, “.JPEG” and the empty “open with” menu magically filled up with all the applications I needed (including Gimp).
Config: Ubuntu Jaunty 64 + Digikam