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0001 .. meta::
0002    :description: Introduction to digiKam Photo Management Program
0003    :keywords: digiKam, documentation, user manual, photo management, open source, free, learn, easy
0004 
0005 .. metadata-placeholder
0006 
0007    :authors: - digiKam Team
0008 
0009    :license: see Credits and License page for details (https://docs.digikam.org/en/credits_license.html)
0010 
0011 .. _application_intro:
0012 
0013 Introduction
0014 ============
0015 
0016 .. contents::
0017 
0018 Background
0019 ----------
0020 
0021 **digiKam** is an advanced digital photo management application for Linux, macOS and Windows desktop. It provides a simple interface which makes importing and organizing digital photographs a *snap*. digiKam enables you to manage large numbers of digital photographs in Albums and to organize these photographs for easy retrieval using tags (keywords), captions, collections, dates, geolocation and searches. It has many features for viewing, organizing, processing and sharing your images. Thus, digiKam is a formidable :ref:`Digital Asset Management <asset_management>` (DAM) software including powerful image editing functions.
0022 
0023 An easy-to-use camera interface is provided as **Import Tool**, that will connect to your digital camera and download photographs directly into digiKam Albums. `More than 1000 digital cameras <http://www.gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php>`_ are supported by the gPhoto library. Of course, any media or card reader supported by your operating system will interface with digiKam.
0024 
0025 digiKam incorporates a fast **Image Editor** with many image editing tools. You can use the Image Editor to view your photographs, comment and rate them, correct, enhance and alter them. The images post processing can be easily done by a set of tools though the **Batch Queue Manager**, or by many import and export tools dedicated to work with remote web services.
0026 
0027 To compare visually images side by side, one other tool named **Light Table** is provided to select the best shots taken from a series.
0028 
0029 .. figure:: images/architecture.webp
0030     :alt:
0031     :align: center
0032 
0033     The digiKam Architecture
0034 
0035 While digiKam remains easy to use, it provides professional level features by the dozens. It is fully 16 bit enabled including all available tools, supports RAW format conversion through libraw, DNG export and ICC color management :ref:`work flow <rawprocessing_workflow>`.
0036 
0037 Support
0038 -------
0039 
0040 digiKam is a community supported project, which means that users and developers support one another. If you become a regular user of digiKam you are encouraged to join the digiKam Users Mailing List. You can start off by asking questions to other digiKam users and hopefully soon you will be answering the support questions of others.
0041 
0042 See the `digiKam Users Mailing List joining instructions <https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/digikam-users>`_ for details.
0043 
0044 You can also visit the `digiKam Home Page <https://www.digikam.org/>`_ for news of new releases and other digiKam related information.