Photography Software

People of all types ask me what kind of software do I like to use.  I figured it's about time I'll post what I do use here.  I am all about Open Source Software.  Please do not confuse with OSS as shareware or reversed engineered software.  It's highly developed and in the process of being improved upon.

I am currently running as my operating system a version of Linux known as Mint, a derivative of Ubuntu. I do dual boot with Win 7.  The project does offer run from CD/DVD option for those who want to try the operating system.
http://www.linuxmint.com/

My base program of use is KDE's digiKam.  DigiKam is a digital imaging work flow program that offers a wide range of Adobe Lightroom features like image tagging and batch processes.  Recently it was ported to the Windows and Mac environments.
http://www.digikam.org/

My main image editor is the GIMP.  It began along side Adobe's Photoshop over a decade ago.  It offers many of the same functions of histogram and level adjustments to resizing images.
http://www.GIMP.org/

For panoramic images I've come across Higin recently.  It takes the hard work of lining up each image when there is sufficient over lap from one image to the next.
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/


The sole Windows only program that I do use is Irfanview.  It is touted as one of the most popular image viewers in the world.  It's selling feature for me is ease of use for batch process like resizing and tagging images.
http://www.irfanview.com/

After working with digital media for a while or a day or so the inevitable will happen, a card will be reformatted or a file deleted.  My program for choice is Testdisk.  I came across this program several years ago when I screwed up an external hard drive while transferring data.  According to other programs the data was un-recoverable.  This program found all the data and the messed up file that caused the error in the first place.  It runs from command line aka C: prompt.  I have  recovered many an image on an over written media card.  The best prevention still is back up multiple times before reformatting any media.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk