There is a noticeable “Lightroom gap” for Linux photographers. The open source project with the best chance of filling that gap at the moment is probably RawTherapee. But RawTherapee won’t be a serious contender for at least a few years. Which is no knock against RawTherapee—it’s just that Lightroom has a significant head start and arguably more development resources.

So I’m evaluating Bibble 5 Pro (version 5.1f). I had to process over 1,000 images this weekend and LightZone was killing me. I really like LightZone. But, damn… it is slow. It does have batch processing capabilities but they’re not particularly robust (there’s no way to apply some adjustments but not others, for example).

Did I mention that Bibble 5 is fast? Being able to flip through a group of images as fast as I can click is awesome. Plus it has a keyboard shortcut for just about everything. Awesome. Plus, the output queues. Awesome. And it has selective editing with layers built-in. Awesome.

On top of all of that, Bibble 5 has built-in asset management (DAM) that supports multiple catalogs, searching, keywords, the works.

I’ve been trying to find a decent DAM application for Linux for a long time. I used F-Spot for a while but stopped using it once I found out it was modifying the EXIF on my original files. They’ve fixed that recently but… once bitten. Shotwell looks very promising so far. It is a basic DAM app. Not as featureful as F-Spot but also not as bloated. It feels much lighter and more responsive.

F-Spot and Shotwell and Lightroom and Bibble all use a database to make searching and browsing your catalog speedy. That means you have to import your photos. What that does is load all of the metadata about each photo and stores that in the database. Then you can add things like keywords that are also saved in the database. The database is important. I’m convinced that this is the way to go for the best combination of features and speed for any DAM app. Apps like gThumb don’t have a database and don’t require you to import your photos. But gThumb is also noticeably slower when searching or doing batch tagging operations.

The database concept is fine with one condition: I must be able to get my data out of the database. I’m creating a photo archive that I intend to use for decades. My archive already spans 14 years and over 40,000 photos. Companies die. Formats change. So, the long-term archiving strategy must be one of upgrading your data to the next format. That includes both hardware and data.

Which is all to say that open formats and the ability to export your data are important. Keywording all of my photos doesn’t do me any good if a few years from now the company goes bust and there is no way to get my data out of their database. What am I supposed to do then? Keep that antique computer running in the closet just so I can look at photos from the turn of the century? Or what if a better app comes along and I just want to switch?

Bibble and Lightroom both support an export format called XMP. It’s basically a little XML file that contains all of a photo’s metadata. XMP isn’t exactly open (Adobe owns it). But it’s open enough. It’s XML and XML files are just text files. You can double click one and open it and read it and it’s pretty easy to write computer programs to parse and work with the data. So one way to export your data is to just export the XMP files.

I created a catalog in Bibble for that project I mentioned earlier. And I poked around in the database folder it created. And I was excited to find out that Bibble uses an open format for its database: SQLite! SQLite is a public domain database engine. That happens to be the same database engine that Lightroom and F-Spot and Shotwell all use, too.

That opens up a lot of doors as far as interoperability and portability goes. For example, it would be possible, using standard non-proprietary tools and technology, to export all of your keyword data from the Bibble 5 database and import it directly into Shotwell’s database. Or create an application that synchronizes all of your keywords between Bibble and F-Spot.

You can browse the Bibble databases by using a SQLite client. On Ubuntu Linux you can install a command line client with: sudo apt-get install sqlite3.

Then you can go into your Bibble catalog folder and type sqlite3 base to open the main database. The meta file contains the metadata database. So then you can do queries like, say, getting all of the keywords for a specific photo:

select mb.value from Master m join Version v on v.masterID=m.id join Container c on c.master=m.id join meta.Browse mb on mb.childID=c.childID join ContainerInfo ci on ci.id=c.id join meta.MetaData mm on mm.id=mb.id where m.id=2732 and mm.value='Keywords';

Except…

If you have a modern camera, you probably shoot a video every once in a while. It annoys me a little that none of these apps handles video. I don’t expect to be able to edit them. But it would be nice if videos could be imported into the asset database and tagged and searched and then I could click and watch them. Shotwell might add video support this year. Bibble and Lightroom probably never will. (I know—they’re photo apps.) I think I’ll either have to ignore my videos for now and wait for a better solution or use a separate system for cataloging my video.

So, that’s where I’m at. Bibble allowed me to cull and process those 1,000 photos with ease. It did crash a couple of times but I never lost any work. Overall, it’s a very good product… way ahead of anything else available for Linux right now in this category. I’m going to experiment with building some catalogs and see how I like the asset management compared to doing the same thing in Shotwell. Video… I’ve still got to figure that out. Share if you’ve got a good system.

I’d love to hear what you think and if you have any solutions to some of the issues I’m having or if you use Bibble’s catalog features.