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.

Now that summer is over and your digital camera is full of pictures, how do you get them organized? At the command line of course! The script provided here automatically organizes them into sub-directories by date.

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.

When you return from a trip and copy your digital pictures over to your file server, you might like to rename the image files or (losslessly) rotate them to their correct orientation to make finding and viewing them simpler.

When invoked without arguments, the date command displays the current date and time. Depending on the options specified, date will set the date and time or print it in a user defined way. I’ve seen many people writing a perl script for calculating yesterday or tomorrow. Computer loves numbers but we love relative terms like 2 days ago.

RPhoto is an open-source image viewer and editor for Windows and Linux. Its origin resides in the lack of a simple software capable of cropping photos with a constant ratio, to avoid white borders when printing.

RPhoto is lightweight, very fast, and offers basic rotate, resize and crop functions, optimizes JPEG files, has a built-in file explorer and is able to read EXIF data.

If you're like most computer users, you probably have a digital camera and scanner. So, you're saving a lot of images and photos on your computer. In addition, there are probably some bits and pieces of photos that you store in an image library so you can incorporate it into a new design or other image.

"I’m guessing that most people with a digital camera or a web site have spent time cropping pictures. There are lots of programs that can do this. Often we start out by using the ones that happen to be installed, and we manage for better or worse with the functionality they happen to have. In this post I hope to show you that the GIMP is a great tool for cropping pictures..."

There is a good possibility that every photo you've imported to F-Spot has had its EXIF date tags altered without your permission and without F-Spot informing you that it has done so.