Compared to powerful and feature-rich photo applications like F-Spot and digiKam, Fotox looks decidedly underpowered. But while Fotox is no match to those powerhouses featurewise, this lightweight tool can come in handy when you have to perform basic photo editing fast and with minimum fuss.

When it comes to organizing and tweaking photos, digiKam and F-Spot rule the roost. But if you don't need all the bells and whistles of a full-blown photo management tool, then you might want to try Shotwell.

Fotoxx is a free open source Linux program for photo editing and collection management. The goal is to meet most user needs while remaining fast and easy to use.

Using digiKam's Kipi plugins, you can upload your photos to a variety of popular photo services, including Flickr, Picasaweb, and SmugMug. But what if you want to host your own photo album and still be able to populate it with photos directly from within digiKam?

F-spot, shotwell, solang -- some distros are arguing about what should be the default "simpler than GIMP" image editor. But there's one that never seems to get mentioned and deserves a look: fotoxx. Despite a name that sounds like a wrinkle treatment, this little image editor is lightweight and doesn't have many dependencies -- great for a netbook or other modest machine.

F-Spot is a graphical photo manager that allows you to tag your image files and search and view images based on those tags. With phpfspot, you can share the photo collection you manage with F-Spot with others through a Web interface and let them navigate through your photos using the tags you have set up.

Virtually any photo manager lets you perform mundane tasks like adjusting contrast, adding a watermark, and applying effects to your photos. But even powerful applications like digiKam and F-Spot can't really help you when you need to perform the same action (or a sequence of actions) on dozens or hundreds of photos. For that you need a batch processing utility like Phatch.

Shutterbugs have found big power in understanding and manipulating digital photos in RAW formats. Linux lovers have the perfect tool for harnessing the RAW power in Digikam, via the built-in LibRaw. Want to claim the power for your own photo efforts? Read on and I'll show you how to tame RAW photos on Linux with Digikam.

digiKam offers several features that can improve photos containing under- or overexposed areas. For example, the Exposure Blending tool lets you merge multiple shots with different exposures into one perfectly exposed photo. But what if you have just a single image?