When you start digiKam for the very first time it will ask you where you store your photographs. You can type in the path name of a folder or click on the folder icon to select a folder from the dialog.

If you already have a collection of photographs on your hard disk, you can enter the top-level folder containing the photographs, this is called the Albums Library folder. digiKam will treat each sub-folder of the folder you've entered as an Album. None of the photographs will be altered. During folders parsing you can see a progress dialog like this:

This parsing for modifications happens at every application start-up, but it can be disabled in the Settings under Miscellaneous

As digiKam uses your folders on your hard disk directly, other applications like file managers can remove any albums outside a digiKam session. In this case digiKam will tell you at the next session if all albums that have been removed from the digiKam photographs root path shall be deleted from albums database. If you want to move folders around and do not want to do that in digiKam, we suggest you do that while digiKam is running, so the database will be kept in sync and you do not lose any metadata.

When you use an existing folder of photographs, as the Album Library folder, you will notice that the Albums in the Album list do not have photographs as their icons. You can change that by dragging any photograph in the Album onto the folder icon in the left sidebar and use this as the Album icon. See the Album section for details of how to change the Album icon.

If you have previously accessed your photograph collection with another application, that has created thumbnails in non-standard sub-folders, digiKam will show these thumbnail folders as separate Albums. digiKam follows the freedesktop.org standards for thumbnail folders. There is no way of hiding non-standard thumbnail folders from the "Albums" list. If you want to keep them you could create an Album Collection that just contains all the thumbnail Folders and then view your Albums in By Collection order. See the Album section for more about Album Collections.

Once you have configured the Album Library Folder you can set up digiKam to work with your digital camera. Then learn how to use Albums and Tags to arrange your photograph Albums.