While I wait for digiKam 0.9 SVN to move towards beta, and get better RAW support, I’ve had to investigate the Windows world of graphics manipulation to find software that I can accept as useable for my purposes. The 190ish photos I feel were worth posting for my Netherlands trip (over 1000 shot, so ~19% is pretty good!) required a few bits of software to get them to a posting state.

1. RawShooter essentials 2006 – I’ve touched on this software earlier. It takes my 9 MB MRWs, and spits out 25 – 35 MB TIFFs.
2. IrfanView 3.98 – Batch convert the TIFFs into 90% quality JPEGs.
3. ExifTool – A perl utility that can read EXIF, IPTC and Makernote data from the MRWs, and apply them to the JPEGs.

Why such a convoluted path? RSE can’t generate anything other than JPG and TIFF in the free version. I potentially wanted to edit the mid-way output, so I chose 16-bit TIFF as the intermediary step. IrfanView can read the 16-bit TIFFs, and claims to write out the EXIF data. In reality, it didn’t (I checked the TIFFs, the data was there), so ExifTool was brought into the picture. ExifTool will read and write just about every image format (so I really hope the Exiv2 guys can collaborate with the author of ExifTool), and can copy tags from one file format to another.

Toss in Gallery Remote to mass-upload my images into the gallery, and I’ve got a full gallery of photos. What’s left now is the tagging and mirroring to Bonito – my offsite hosting (as my entire site runs from my ADSL line). Feel free to check out the Netherlands gallery, but until the upload is done, it’s going to be a bit slow :(