Following the 5th release 5.5.0 published in March 2017, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.6.0 of digiKam Software Collection. With this version the HTML gallery and the video slideshow tools are back, database shrinking (e.g. purging stale thumbnails) is also supported on MySQL, grouping items feature has been improved, the support for custom sidecars type-mime have been added, the geolocation bookmarks introduce fixes to be fully functional with bundles, the support for custom sidecars, and of course a lots of bug has been fixed.
Once again a lot has been going on behind the scenes since the last release. The HTML gallery tool is back, database shrinking (e.g. purging stale thumbnails) is also supported on MySQL, grouping has been improved and additional sidecars can now be specified. Therefore the release of 5.6.0 will be (is already) delayed, as we would like to invite you to test all these features. As usual they are available in the pre-release bundles or obviously directly from the git repository. Please report any dysfunctions, unexpected behaviour or suggestions for improvement to our bug tracker.
The folks from the PIXLS.US community saw that digiKam needed an update to the old website (previously running on an older Drupal instance) for security reasons and they wanted to help out.
So after several weeks of hard work, the digiKam team has deployed a new look-and-feel for the website that is easier to navigate and mobile-friendly.
Don’t worry, all the content from the old website has been preserved so all the old links should be fine. You can find the links to this content in the footer of the new site.
Following the 5th release 5.4.0 published in January 2017, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.5.0 of digiKam Software Collection. As 5.4.0, this version introduces again several improvements in database interface.
This time, Mario Frank has significantly improved the threads management done in background to prevent an overload of the computer under intensive workload by batch processing of items. The maintenance now does not generate massive amounts of threads anymore. Instead, we use a queue based approach to level the load on the CPUs more appropriately. This should improve the re-activeness during maintenance.
Following the 4th release 5.3.0 for the 5.x series published in November 2016, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.4.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces several improvements to the similarity search engine and a complete re-write of video file support.
Our new contributor Mario Frank has significantly improved the usability of the fuzzy sidebar functionality by offering more information to the user. In duplicates search, every result now contains the average similarity of the potential duplicates to the original. This information can be used to sort the results. The individual elements of the duplicate search result can be sorted by similarity to the original image now, which also works in fuzzy search and sketch search.
Sometimes, the easiest way to geotag photos in digiKam is to copy and paste geographical coordinates from an existing photo. I usually use Google Photos for that, as it conveniently displays geographical coordinates of the currently viewed photos in the information sidebar.
There is only one problem with this technique: copying and pasting the geographical coordinates directly doesn't work.
After a 3rd release 5.2.0 published more than one month ago, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.3.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces an important common solution to deploy the application under Linux using AppImage bundle.
AppImage is an open-source project dedicated to provide a simple way to distribute portable software as compressed binary file, that standard user can run as well, without to install special dependencies. All is included into the bundle, as last Qt5 and KF5 frameworks. AppImage use Fuse file-system, which is de-compressed into a temporary directory to start the application. You don't need to install digiKam on your system to be able to use it. Better, you can use the official digiKam from your Linux distribution in parallel, and test the new version without any conflict with one used in production. This permit to quickly test a new release without to wait an official package dedicated for your Linux box. Another AppImage advantage is to be able to provide quickly a pre-release bundle to test last patches applied to source code, outside the releases plan.
Hot on the heels of the major digiKam 5.x.x release comes a thoroughly revised version of the digiKam Recipes book. Although it doesn’t include any new material, the entire content and all screenshots have been revised and updated to reflect changes in the latest version of digiKam. In addition to that, some obsolete content has been removed. But a shiny new book cover featuring catchy colors makes up for that.
Like many photographers, I have a handful of hand-made favorite presets (most of them are included in the Daily Curves Set) in my photographic toolbox. But there is one preset in particular I use more often than others. I named it Spektrum, as it’s inspired by images from the Spektrum Berlin photo book by Matthias Heiderich.
After a second release 5.1.0 published one month ago, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.2.0 of digiKam Software Collection. This version introduces a new bugs triage and some fixes following new feedback from end-users.
This release introduce also a new red eyes tool which automatize the red-eyes effect reduction process. Faces detection is processed on whole image and a new algorithm written by a Google Summer of Code 2016 student named Omar Amin is dedicated to recognize shapes and try to found eyes with direct flash reflection on retina.
