Ubuntu – What good software is available for editing RAW photo files

As noted briefly on the Ubuntu forums, quite a good way of arranging a scrapbook or album of photos is by using Scribus, using one of the Python scripts from the Scribus wiki, and then exporting the album as a pdf.

So, first run

sudo apt-get install scribus

Then go the Scribus wiki page and save, for example, the first script to file and make it executable. Now load up Scribus, and from within the program go to Script > Execute Script > choose location of script. Then via the script dialogue you can choose the number of images to be displayed on a page, and select the folder of images to be used. (You can either pre-prepare a special folder with the images you want or just choose any folder with images.) The Scribus document will include them all, however many there are, although it will take longer to create if there are a lot of images.

Once your document is created you can add titles and captions, and export it as a pdf so that it can be shared. It is of course possible to modify the Python scripts and create one that suits your particular needs. The scripts may of course need to be updated when new versions of Scribus come out.

I have found this is a good way of creating a personalised album without recourse to java or flash based programs.

The screenshot below shows the pictures imported in Scribus, but before the captions and any title page are added. You don't need to worry about this becoming a complex desktop publishing project, as it is very easy and fast to create your own albums.

There is an batch converter called DNGconverter. Parts of KDE might be dependencies but it's in the Software Center for installation so that will be taken care of.

Some of the comments on it in software center are saying there's a problem with a work around, you might want to investigate this. There are a few applications like UFRaw that handle raw files very well, you might want to see if there's batch processing capabilities with that one.