[nflug] Managing Pictures on Linux

[Joe]

I'm new to digital cameras.  I have several thousand images (photos)
loaded to my hard disk from my camera.

I want to select a subset for printing, etc.

I'm running kubuntu hardy on a Centrino Duo notebook.

In Picasa, it does what I want, but the album viewer pane acts like a
web page which makes scrolling and locating pictures really annoying. 
The nice thing about Picasa is that it doesn't store pictures.  It just
points to them so if you delete one, you're just deleting it out of
Picasa, not off your disk.  It does not appear to have a search function.

I'm looking into Digikam.  It displays the pictures sanely and lets you
search them in a normal (good) way, but treats them as the actual
files.  If you delete one, it's totally gone.  I can deal with that, but
how do I select some for printing?

I tried the following (in Digikam):
I created a whole album of pictures  that  I want to print a subset of.
These are copies, so deleting some would be OK (but not optimal).

I set a tag on all of them called "Print".  I can then go through and
remove this tag from any I don't want to print.

I created a search on the album that displays all the pictures with the
"Print" tag set.  That works, but I can't see any way to copy just those
images to somewhere else like a memory stick or CD to take to a photo shop.

I also attempted to install f-spot, but it has some problems working
under kde - at least on my system - and is not usable at the moment.

Any ideas on how to tackle this would be appreciated.  I want to settle
on one image manager and get back to managing my pictures.

TIA

Joe