Program to use with Phoenix/xfce for downloading digital photos

[Far North]

I'm sure that this has been a query in the past by someone, however, my guesses at what to search for turned up nothing concrete. I have the 2010 version of Phoenix/xfce (downloaded 23 April) running as a LiveCD testing it out. I like what I've seen so far but haven't found a program that will connect to my digital camera -- a Canon PowerShot A590. So, I when I install Phoenix, I have to download an appropriate program.

I've tried F-Spot in the past and haven't had much success with it. This program is not a favourite of mine. We do not seem to get along, even with the page and a half or documentation downloaded a couple years ago from their website.

My question is: what is in the repositories that will "see" my camera attached to my 5+ year old Gateway laptop, start up and ask me where it should download my fine photos? I did search the repository that has "indiana" as that's part of it's name and after updating the files got a few programs that, I assume, relate to photography in some way. What will work with my camera under Phoenix? I think I used DigiKam (or something) with PCLOS 2007 in the past but didn't have a digital camera at that time. I'm not too sure about adding DigiKam and it's bulk to Phoenix.

I've decided to ask the forum for their suggestions (or for how I should tell the search engine what I want so it can answer).

Far North
(but living further south now...)   

[kalwisti]

Hi, Far North,

I'm relatively new to Xfce and still learning my way around this environment. But I think that you may not have to do anything special to have your digital camera recognized. Xfce has a "goodie" called Thunar Volume Manager (thunar-volman) which is installed by default in PCLOS Phoenix; once it has been properly configured, it will automatically launch your preferred photo application and import the new pictures from the camera into your photo collection. You can read about it here:

http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/thunar-plugins/thunar-volman

I tried an experiment just now with our digital camera (HP Photosmart R742) and an inexpensive USB card reader. The camera's SD card was automatically mounted as a storage device, and displayed thumbnails of the photos on the card. (Note: If you run into problems, you may need to slightly alter your Canon's settings so that it is configured/recognized as a mass storage device). Based on my experience, it's worth the small expense of a card reader because your photos will download much faster from the card reader than directly from the camera.

As for photo-album-type applications, I'm not aware of any Xfce-native programs but I did some searching and saw these apps mentioned as being more lightweight than digiKam. (I checked and all of them are available in the PCLOS repositories):

gthumb 2.11-3

geeqie 1.0beta2-1 (This is a recent fork of gqview.)

gqview 2.1.5-2 (Apparently gqview is no longer under active development.)

picasa 3.0.5744-02 (If you install Picasa, do not allow it to index all the image files on your computer's hard drive, or you'll be waiting a veeerry long time. Make sure that you limit its indexing to your Pictures and/or Photos album. It has been a while since I used it, but IIRC, Picasa asks you the indexing question the first time you run the program.)

Maybe one of these programs will meet your needs without the extra bulk of KDE dependencies required by digiKam. I will be trying one -- or more -- of them out before long. My Phoenix Xfce installation is only two days old, so I'm doing basic configuration at the moment.  HTH,
=david