Digital media files are more useful and accessible when tagged with metadata -- that is, descriptive information about each photo that either can be embedded inside images themselves or stored in external databases. ExifTool is an efficient, flexible, and portable way to manage image, audio, and video metadata under Linux.

Both of the big powerhouses in the digital SLR camera market -- Canon and Nikon -- make software with which you can control your camera from your PC through an attached USB cable. It is a nice tool for situations when manually triggering the shutter might cause shake (such as long exposures), or for automating multiple shots at timed intervals.

Even the most basic digital cameras can store a lot of useful information about photos in the EXIF format, including exposure time, aperture settings, focal length, and metering mode. The EXIF metadata can also contain the photo's geographical coordinates, which provide the exact position of where the photo was taken, but only few cameras on the market support this feature. However, you can add geographical information to your photos (i.e., geotag them) even if you don't have a fancy camera or GPS receiver using the Geotag tool. This nifty utility allows you to quickly geotag multiple photos in one go and do some other interesting things with them.

There are many new features and bugfixes since 1.0 including: New Info View that provides helpful information about your media when you need it and integrated metadata editing and drilling; Info fetchers to help lookup additional media information for Artists, Movies, TV Shows, Actors, etc.; Support for Audio and Video feeds; Organize and browse media using tags; Improved DVD support including su

While the vast majority of my video editing is very simple "linear" editing to remove commercials, join in a title section, etc, there are times when I need to get a little more creative.

Last year I bought both of the Linux Toys books. One of the projects inside that caught my eye was the digital picture frame. I'd just been in an unnamed large department store where I saw a picture frame that would be perfect for this kind of a project - the catch was I didn't have the "spare" notebook required by the project.

1. You will need to have Gimp 2.6 installed and ready.Now create a new picture with 640 x 480 (480 minus some space for the text cursor). The original Slitaz splash will be 640 x 346 pixels.2. Now create your....

In this part I want to stress how important pre-planning is with respect to the entire project. I took the project right through to the end - with a working digital picture frame as an end result, but I learned some things about what frame to choose, matting and other non-geek aspects that would make building a digital picture frame simpler.

As storage space becomes cheaper, there's a growing trend to save digital music files in a lossless format. Such lossless formats provide an exact replication of the audio quality found in the original content, usually on CD. The resulting files are also much larger, when compared to MP3 or AAC at 128kbps or 256kpbs.