For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, I’ve started taking a lot more pictures recently. Over the last 6 weeks I’ve taken around 1,500 to 2,000! This surge in activity has been matched by a change from capturing the images as JPEG to RAW.

I’d played with capturing in RAW a few times over the last few years, but the lack of an obvious application on Ubuntu to handle the conversion in a reliable manner held me back from making the switch permanent. It became just another “thing to play with” from time to time. So what made me make the switch?

Someone recommended I look at Bibble and Bibble Pro. The application runs on Ubuntu and handles the entire workflow that RAW images need. It may not be quite as polished as Aperture or Lightroom, but it runs on Linux where the other two don’t. It has taken a while to get used to Bibble, but the support available via their web forum is superb and the tools it offers work well. It’s not an open source project, but as it’s becoming one I use every day I was more than happy to pay for a licence!

Inevitably the combination of the increase in picture taking and the change of format pushed my storage requirements beyond my available capacity on a regular basis, so I acquired 2 4Gb CF cards 🙂