.. meta:: :description: Introduction to digiKam Photo Management Program :keywords: digiKam, documentation, user manual, photo management, open source, free, learn, easy .. metadata-placeholder :authors: - digiKam Team :license: see Credits and License page for details (https://docs.digikam.org/en/credits_license.html) .. _application_intro: Introduction ============ .. contents:: Background ---------- **digiKam** is an advanced digital photo management application for Linux, macOS and Windows desktop. It provides a simple interface which makes importing and organizing digital photographs a *snap*. digiKam enables you to manage large numbers of digital photographs in Albums and to organize these photographs for easy retrieval using tags (keywords), captions, collections, dates, geolocation and searches. It has many features for viewing, organizing, processing and sharing your images. Thus, digiKam is a formidable :ref:`Digital Asset Management ` (DAM) software including powerful image editing functions. An easy-to-use camera interface is provided as **Import Tool**, that will connect to your digital camera and download photographs directly into digiKam Albums. `More than 1000 digital cameras `_ are supported by the gPhoto library. Of course, any media or card reader supported by your operating system will interface with digiKam. digiKam incorporates a fast **Image Editor** with many image editing tools. You can use the Image Editor to view your photographs, comment and rate them, correct, enhance and alter them. The images post processing can be easily done by a set of tools though the **Batch Queue Manager**, or by many import and export tools dedicated to work with remote web services. To compare visually images side by side, one other tool named **Light Table** is provided to select the best shots taken from a series. .. figure:: images/architecture.webp :alt: :align: center The digiKam Architecture While digiKam remains easy to use, it provides professional level features by the dozens. It is fully 16 bit enabled including all available tools, supports RAW format conversion through libraw, DNG export and ICC color management :ref:`work flow `. Support ------- digiKam is a community supported project, which means that users and developers support one another. If you become a regular user of digiKam you are encouraged to join the digiKam Users Mailing List. You can start off by asking questions to other digiKam users and hopefully soon you will be answering the support questions of others. See the `digiKam Users Mailing List joining instructions `_ for details. You can also visit the `digiKam Home Page `_ for news of new releases and other digiKam related information.