Photo Database.

Things going on behind the scenes, here? The search for a new database programme for my images.

As you may guess, I've accumulated a lot of images over the years - photos, drawings, scans from books, videos, you name it. There's a few private and personal ones, but most of them are work-related. They've been handled by a wonderful programme called FotoTime ever since I discovered that, ages ago.

Unfortunately, the company lost their servers in an accident back in March 2021, and has ceased operation due to that. Some of their users lost all their pictures and data (never, never place something important in just one place, file-wise!). Fortunately, for me, that is not the case, but at some point in the future, the programme will probably be too old to work with the current version of Windows... so I thought it might be a smart thing to look into a replacement.

The really nice thing about FotoTime was that you could place your images in a folder structure on your computer that was unrelated to the "album" folder structure in the programme. You could set a date, and keywords, and a copyright notice, and an image description... and all those, of course, I'd like to have transferred to a new programme. Preferably also one that keeps my folder structure.

Some possible databases have already been ruled out, but the one I'm looking at currently is digiKam. It's free and open source, and my test installation seems to at least conserve all the things that were in the old database - and maybe I'll be able to migrate the old database into the new one once I've gotten an idea of how they are structured, and how they work.

If you have a good image database for organising your photos, do let me know what you are using!