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Digikam
Strengths [Weaknesses]
Photo Management
Digital photography has left most people with thousands of photos that they never look at because they cannot begin to organise them all. Digikam is a powerful and flexible organisational environment with the ability to proof and process the best of your shots.
Configurable
The KDE family is know for configurability, and Digikam is no exception. They're your photographs, so you deal with them anyway you want; Digikam will help, but never get in your way.
Weaknesses [Strengths]
Complex
This is an application filled with features and configuration options, so it takes time to learn it entirely, and then more time to decide which features you want to use and which ones you want to ignore.
No Non-Destructive Editing
Compared to Darktable, which configures non-linear filters through which you may view and export those images, Digikam modifies the pixels of the image and applies filters linearly.
Not a Compositor
Digikam is not GIMP. It promotes a different workflow and does not have the extensive compositing features that GIMP has.
Digikam is a direct competitor to powerful digital darkroom applications as well as to photo managers. It is fully featured, powerful, and has a rich plugin structure which enables the addition of even more features as the need arises (such as quick uploaders to popular online photo shares, new filters, and so on). Even if a graphic artist or photographer is happy using GIMP, digikam is a useful tool for its workflow and image manipulation ability.
An ebook with Digikam “recipes” is available from one of the developers: dmpop.dhcp.io/digikamrecipes.md
While GIMP concentrates on enabling an artist to open an image for re-touching, compositing, and general manipulation, Digikam's goal is to organize photographs, making them easy to see as an overview of a photoshoot or life events and to choose the best “take” out of multiple images. It can also do image correction and even has a robust set of plugins and filters such that it approaches some of more interesting features of GIMP. However, it does not try to emulate or replace GIMP and is not meant for serious compositing, such as combining parts of two almost-perfect photographs to make one perfect shot, or adding text or elaborate lighting effects.
Digikam is installable from http://slackbuilds.org.
See Also
Darktable
GIMP
Lightzone