digiKam Software Collection 4.11.0 released…

Dear digiKam fans and users,

The digiKam Team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.11.0. This release is the result of huge bugs triage on KDE bugzilla where more than 250 files have been closed as duplicate, invalid, or upstream states. Thanks to Maik Qualmann who maintain KDE4 version while KF5 port and GSoC 2015 projects are in progress. Both are planed to be completed before end of this year.

With this 4.11.0 version, we hacked packaging release scripts for OSX. PKG installers are now available officially for Mountain Lion, Maverick, and Yosemite. Each one require one day of tunes and compilations with virtual machines. We have tried with older OSX releases, as Lion, but due to the huge list of ports to compile, some dependencies are not compilable as well, and require a lots of manual adjustments. So, we have limited OSX versions to support voluntary.

Under OSX, digiKam bundle package built with Macports is installed in a dedicated place /opt/digikam to prevent all conflicts with a standard Macports install. It will be easy to uninstall too, but deleting this directory as well. Later we will add a simpler way to perform uninstall task, but it's not a priority for the moment. Note that if you have installed and older digiKam version, installing a new one will uninstall previous one safety.

Considerate digikam under OSX as beta stage, not stable as under Linux, but at least now, you can install it on your Apple computer in few seconds instead to wait some hours of compilation. The PKG prepare bundle background KDE used by digiKam to a suitable configuration and environment. Standard Macports install do not tune well all these points for digiKam. The OSX hack will continue with next KDE4 releases of digiKam. Some dysfunctions have been already identified and we will try to fix it step by step.

Outside the fact that main components under OSX are managed through Macports to build PKG, we have tune compilation of last Exiv2 0.25, LibRaw 0.16.2, and LensFun 0.3.1 which do not exist yet in Macports repository. Exiv2 includes huge fixes about video support which can crash digiKam, and Libraw/Lensfun add new recent camera supports. In the future, we plan to include Hugin CLI tools too required at run-time by Panorama and ExpoBlending tools.

The OSX digiKam PKG is not an Apple signed bundle installer. To do it we must pay 99$ by year which is very expensive for an Open Source project. If your computer is protected by Apple GateKeeper, you can bypass safety this protection at install time without to touch your computer settings. Just follow simple instructions given in this tutorial.

You can consult the huge list of the issues closed in digiKam 4.11.0 available through the KDE Bugs-tracking System.

The digiKam software collection tarball, OSX, and Windows installer can be downloaded from the KDE mirrors.

Have fun to use this new important digiKam release.

digiKam Team...