Binary package hint: digikam
64-bit Kubuntu jaunty; digikam 0.10.0.
It is far too hard to organize one's pictures in digikam if one uses multiple cameras.
The root of the problem lies in the fact that each camera will independently name its image files. So if one imports files from multiple cameras, then the filenames will be duplicated. (The same happens if a camera is reset; often the filenames begin to recycle in that case.) This is not a problem as long as one imports the files into different albums. However, if one has (for example) an album of pictures of flowers, then when one attempts to move a set of images of flowers from camera X into that album, it is frequently the case that many files with the same name from camera Y already exist in the album.
It seems to me that the point of digikam is to organize *photos*, not files, and for many people they will not care about the underlying filename; hence, it would make sense to provide an option so that in the case of a filename conflict, the destination filename can be changed without user interaction (say, by appending "-NNN" where NNN is a number -- that's just a suggestion, though -- to the base filename).
In this scheme, then, if the album "Flowers" already has a file called "DSC0050.jpg" and one attempts to copy/move another image that happens also to be called "DSC0050.jpg" into the album, then digikam would automatically create the file in the "Flowers" album with the name "DSC0050-001.jpg".
This problem is not so bad if one is moving small numbers of files around, but if one is moving hundreds of photos at a time, the current scheme of warning about name conflicts and requiring explicit user involvement is simply impractical.
There is an option on the import dialog to include the photo timestamp to the filename, as well as adding counter to the end of the filename. The effectively makes it unique in most cases (unless you're shooting with several cameras simultaneously).
I set digikam to rename imported files prefixing them with "photo_" and including a custom format timestamp using the format "yyyyMMddThhmmss". The custom format is the ISO format with punctuation removed. The reason I remove punctuation is that sometimes I have to copy photos to windows and windows won't accept colons in file name.
So my imports end up with filenames that look like this:
photo_20090521T
photo_20090521T
... etc
I like the timestamp in the filename personally; but for users who don't want to set this up, it does seem like a good idea to me to have a simple "auto rename" option that can persist between import sessions... perhaps prompting the user the first time, but once selected never bothers them again (ever).