A very common way to download your photos on your openSUSE desktop is to use the file browser. This might be Dolphin (KDE) or Files/Nautilus (Gnome). First thing you do is create the new folders that you need for your photos. You plug-in the SD card or connect your camera via USB cable. And then you drag the photo files to the location(s) of your choosing.

But there is a smarter and quicker way and its called Rapid Photo Downloader. And once you try this program, you never want to go back. The easiest way to get this program is just search for “rapid-photo-downloader” in YAST Software Management, select “Install” and then “Accept”. After the installation you should be able to find the program under the “Graphics” section of your Application Launcher menu.

One time configuration

To start the configuration, go to the Preferences of this application. This is where you perform the initial (one time) setup of how you want to import your photos and videos.

Start with setting up the folder where you want all your photos to go. Click on the drop-down for the “Download folder” and select “Other…”.

Then select the folder that you want to use for your photos. I like to know what camera I used for taking the photos. But you might be content with just the subfolder Photos.

/home/yourname/Pictures/Photos/CameraName/

The magic of Rapid Photo Downloader is that you can specify how the application will automatically create the future folder structure for your photos. I like to use folders per month. For example: “2018 03”, “2018 04”, “2018 05”, etc. You can specify this by using the settings (marked in red) in the screenshot below. As you can see from the screenshot, I also create a sub folder named RAW.

The second part of the magic of Rapid Photo Downloader is that you can specify how to automatically rename your photos. I have chosen a very simple setup, where I concatenate the image date and the original name and extension with an underscore in between.

Now you are done with the setup for the photos. Continue with the setup of the videos. In the screenshots below you can see the setup that I use.

Now close the preferences window.

Downloading photos

Downloading your photos is very easy. The first thing you have to make sure is that you have plugged-in the SD card or have connected your camera via USB cable. The second thing you need to do is to mount the external photo medium by simply opening the folder once in your file manager of choice. Then startup Rapid Photo Downloader. The program will automatically detect the photo medium and load all photos on the card. Most likely you are only interested in the latest photos that you haven’t yet downloaded. So click “Uncheck All” to clear the current selection. Then select the first photo that you like to download.

Now scroll down to the last photo, hold down the “Shift” key on your keyboard and select the last photo you want to download. If you are fine with the selection, click on “Download”.

Now Rapid Photo Downloader will auto-magically download all photos to your openSUSE desktop… exactly how you want it.

Published on: 3 May 2018