# The &showfoto; Handbook

## Introduction

### Background

#### About &showfoto;

&showfoto; is a fast Image Editor with powerful image editing tools. You can use it to view your photographs and improve them.

#### Reporting Bugs

Like the rest of &kde;, &showfoto; is an Open Source project. This means that it relies on its users to play their part by, at least, reporting problems and suggesting possible improvements.

&showfoto; makes it as easy as possible for you to report bugs or suggest improvements. Wherever you are in the application the Help menu will include a Report Bugs option. This will display a message box with a highlighted link. Click on the link and your web browser will open the page for the reporting system. All the information required will already be filled in, just follow the instructions for completing your report.

#### Support

&showfoto; is a community supported project, which means that users and developers support one another. If you become a regular user of &showfoto; you are encouraged to join the &showfoto; Users Mailing List. You can start off by asking questions of other &showfoto; users and hopefully soon you will be answering the support questions of others.

&showfoto; Users Mailing List joining instructions.

You can also visit the &digikam; Home Page. for news of new releases and other &showfoto; related information.

#### Getting Involved

There are many ways that you can get involved with the continued development of &showfoto;. You do not need to be a software developer. You can help with documentation, translation and user interface design or just contribute really good ideas to the wish-list. You can also get involved by testing early development code as it is being developed and providing feedback to the developers. Of course, if you are a software developer then you can help to make &showfoto; the best digital photograph application there is.

The best way to start getting involved with &showfoto; is to join the Developers Mailing List. &showfoto; Developer Mailing List joining instructions.

&doc-file-formats;

## The &showfoto; sidebar

### &digikam; sidebar

#### Introduction to the right sidebar

The &showfoto; main window has a sidebar at the right border providing important information and actions of the selected images. This same sidebar is also available in the Image Editor view. It can be displayed by respectively clicking on one of the five tabs:

- Properties : File and image properties, key shooting parameters (EXIF tags)

- Metadata : EXIF, Makernotes, IPTC and GPS data (these properties can be edited by two kipi-plugins

- Colors : Histograms and embedded ICC profiles

Clicking successively onto the same tab will make the sidebar pop up or fold back into the border.
&doc-sidebar;

## Using &showfoto;

&doc-photo-editing;

### &showfoto; Configuration

&showfoto; tries to give you as much control on how it works as possible. There are many options that change the behavior of &showfoto;. To access these settings select Setting Configure &showfoto; from the Menu Bar. The configuration dialog is separated into eight pages. You can change between these pages by clicking on the icons on the left-hand side of the dialog.

#### The Configuration Dialog

The Interface Options section is rather self-explanatory.

The Exposure Indicators lets one choose the color to use when the under- respectively over-exposure indicators are selected. Preferentially the colors should be contrasting with what they indicate, that is, under-exposure should have a light color and over-exposure areas should show dark colors.

General Settings

- Tooltip settings, these are self-explanatory

- RAW file decoding settings

- ICC profiles settings

- Save images settings

- The native slideshow settings

## Menu Descriptions

&doc-ie-menu;
&doc-credits-annexes;