digiKam 7.3.0 is released

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After four months of maintenance, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.3.0 of its open source digital photo manager.

Here is the list of most important features coming with this release:

ExifTool Support

The famous ExifTool is now supported officially in parallel than the former Exiv2 shared library to handle file metadata. ExifTool is a powerful tool that we will use in special cases to fix metadata dysfunctions that we cannot solve using Exiv2. An ExifTool metadata viewer have been appended to the metadata sidebar everywhere in digiKam. The view works exactly as the Exiv2 version, including the metadata entries filter. ExifTool supports a largest list of file formats than Exiv2.

• 382631 View HDR metadata
• 386299 Add ExifTool based metadata viewer as XnView
• 437750 digiKam causes 20 exiftool (32) .exe to run in the Task Manager panel at the end of the day W10
• 438888 Exiftool - non ASCII characters
• 439057 Output helpers for ExifTool data (print, save, copy)
• 439059 “exiftoollistviewgroup”
• 439231 ExifTool and e.g. *.psd images

DNG Converter Update

DNG Converter received a major update of the internal Adobe SDK for better support of modern original RAW files features and Digital Negative targets. This batch tool is also available on Showfoto with this version.

• 147933 WISH: link the keywords of images with same name but different extension img1245.jpg liked to img1245.dng
• 255554 No Color Profile Assigned When Generating ProPhoto TIF File From DNG
• 320039 EXIF will be lost if user tries to convert DNG to JPEG
• 435250 No Photograph Properties for DNG files
• 403267 digiKam is not reading tags from DNG images when sidecars are present
• 284934 Allow to embed multiple JPEG in DNG Converter
• 330920 Previews and thumbnails of DNG converted from Canon EOS350D CR2 have incorrect red colors - Update to DNG SDK 1.5
• 381967 Some lens metadata lost in converting CR2 into DNG
• 429119 Convert RAW Nikon NEF to DNG tool adds text to caption field
• 438856 ShowFoto - DNG-Converter II
• 418645 DNG files created with Adobe DNG Converter from Fuji S3 RAW files appear purple - Update to DNG SDK 1.5
• 431689 Nokia 9 PureView DNG image demosaicing preview corruption
• 438855 ShowFoto - DNG-Converter I

Better Support of FITS Astro-Photo and MPO Multi-Picture Formats

FITS and MPO, are now fully supported in the 7.3.0 release, including metadata. Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of data, formatted as multi-dimensional arrays, for example a 2D image, or tables. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy. JPEG Multi-Picture Format (MPO) is a JPEG-based format for storing multiple images in a single file. It contains two or more JPEG files concatenated together. Various devices use it to store 3D images, such as Fujifilm, Panasonic, and Sony. Thanks to ImageMagick codec and ExifTool parser working in the background.

• 393408 Support for extra image formats as HEIC, FITS, WEBP [patch]
• 435231 Loading .FITS images for astrophotography
• 309542 Support metadata on 3D photos in MPO format

New Tool to Export to iNaturalist

A new plugin was developed and tested to export photos to iNaturalist. This web-service is a social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist receive observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide, and around 130K users were currently active.

iNaturalist describes itself as “an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature”, with its primary goal being to connect people to nature. Although it is not a science project itself, iNaturalist is a platform for science and conservation efforts, providing valuable open data to research projects, land managers, other organizations, and the public.

• 394544 New tool to export to inaturalist

Slideshow and Presentation Tools Improvements

A long time feature was to allow users to send current items displayed to the trash during SlideShow. A student selected this year for the Google Summer of Code event has worked on this topic and extended this feature to the Presentation tool.

• 426859 Idea: Move to trash from slideshow

Find Duplicates Improvements

With the previous version, searching a big amount of pictures for duplicates takes a lot of time using one CPU core only. With this new release, all CPU cores are now used to speed the search in the database, and we introduce few usability improvements reported by end-users.

• 372435 Use multiple cpu cores for duplicate search [patch]
• 435803 DigiKam Not Responding when moving from Albums between Similarity and Search options.
• 436671 Similarity-Duplicates the active menu tab always moves to the first tab, no location memory.
• 437655 Store fuzzy search without a name
• 432066 Preview does not update when changing the photo using the keyboard in geolocation editor

Summer Works

Tree students has been selected this year to work with us during Google Summer of code event:

• Anjani Kumar to port digiKam to Qt6
• Phuoc-Khanh LE to improve Image Quality Sorter algorithms
• Nghia Duong to Improve face recognition accuracy on noisy data nad performance on large datasets

Student works are expected to be merged in september for future 8.0.0 release.

Final Words

As you can see, digiKam version 7.3.0 has a lot going for it. The bugzilla entries closed alone for this release are impressive, with more than 370 files closed this summer.

Thanks to all users for your support and donations, and to all contributors, students, testers who allowed us to improve this release.

digiKam 7.3.0 source code tarball, Linux 64 bits AppImage bundles, MacOS Intel package, and Windows 64 bits installers can be downloaded from this repository.

Happy digiKaming.