digiKam is a free and open source image organizer and tag editor.
After almost three years since the formation of the last branch, the release of the new version of digiKam 8.0.0 was announced .
For those unfamiliar with digiKam, it's an application developed within the KDE project . The program provides a comprehensive set of tools for importing, managing, editing, and publishing raw photos and images from digital cameras.
DigiKam 8.0.0 Key New Features
In this new version of digiKam 8.0.0, significant work has been done to improve the usability of the interface, as a new "hamburger" menu has been added to the toolbar, which appears when the main menu is hidden or when switching to full screen mode.
It is also worth noting the launch of a new website, docs.digikam.org, featuring online documentation that has been translated from DocBook format to Sphinx/ReStructuredText. This change has increased the visibility of information (for example, screenshots and screencasts have been added), simplified maintenance, and improved the translation process.
On the part of the support improvements, the extended support for file formats stands out, in addition to the fact that the ability to export, versioned storage and batch processing of files in JPEG-XL, WEBP and AVIF formats was implemented, the support for Extended editions of the JPEG-2000 format and support for RAW images provided for various camera models including the Phase One/Leaf IIQ-S v2, Canon CR3, Canon CRM, Canon EOS R3, and more.
Another notable change in this new version is the addition of two tools to the Batch Queue Manager : the first for rating and tagging, and the second for handling headings and notes in different languages, checking spelling, and adding translations.
Of the other changes that stand out in this new version:
- Improved metadata processing.
- ExifTool has been updated to version 12.59.
- The search engine now has the ability to search based on facial recognition parameters.
- Options have been added to the advanced metadata settings page to save and load settings profiles that define the information written to the image metadata area.
- Added SQLite WAL (Write-Ahead-Logging) database operation mode to improve storage reliability.
- Added a new engine for automatic image classification using machine learning.
- The engine can be used to rank images by quality level based on content, layout, object placement, and other parameters.
- Improved integration with the G'MIC-Qt image processing framework, which can be used to apply filters in image editing mode.
- The codebase has been adapted to build with Qt6 (Qt5 is still used by default for official builds).
- Added a new tool for OCR on scanned images. The Tesseract OCR engine is used for recognition.
- Improved work with text information and added support for spell checking in properties, notes, and editable text data.
- Added language settings for the text editing widget, allowing to automatically translate entered text data using online services and save the result in another language.
Finally, if you want to know more about it, you can consult the official announcement at the following link.
How to install digiKam on Linux?
Various packages for installing the software can be found at KDE.org. For Linux users, there are Appimage files and source code ready.
For those interested in installing this new version on their systems, you can do so by downloading the AppImage file available in the KDE repositories. To do this, open a terminal and type the following command:
wget https://download.kde.org/stable/digikam/8.0.0/digiKam-8.0.0-x86-64.appimage
We give execution permissions with:
sudo chmod +x digiKam-8.0.0-x86-64.appimage
And they can run the application by double clicking or from the terminal with:
./digiKam-8.0.0-x86-64.appimage