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Posts Tagged ‘digiKam’

digiKam 7.1.0 ‘maintenance’ bug fix update arrives with a few new features

10 Sep

Open-source photo management app digiKam is back with another update a little more than a month after launching its big version 7.0.0 release. This latest update largely revolves around ‘maintenance,’ but it does include a few relatively minor new features amid the numerous bug fixes.

With digiKam version 7.1.0, the team has expanded upon its basic Canon CR3 RAW metadata support, enabling the software to read a greater amount of Exif tags, including color profile and GPS data. The team explains that dealing with camera RAW files is a ‘big challenge’ due to, among other things, the lack of standardization.

DigiKam 7.1.0 features a metadata interface that was written based on the libraw library, expanding the CR3 read support. However, the app doesn’t feature write support for this particular RAW format. The full list of cameras support for libraw can be found on its website here.

The expanded CR3 support aside, digiKam 7.1.0 brings a new Batch Queue Manager plugin offering an automatic fix for Hot Pixels. This feature isn’t new; rather, the update improves it and enables the tool to ‘manage a collection of black frames from different camera models,’ according to the team.

The Batch Queue Manager has also received another new plugin, this one for applying textures to images. As with the Hot Pixels fix, this tool has already been available in the Image Editor, but adding it to the Batch Queue Manager makes it possible to automatically process target images.

Finally, the new digiKam update also brings expanded IPTC compatibility with UTF-8 characters encoding, according to the team, enabling users to use ‘extended characters set everywhere in legacy IPTC text containers.’

These tweaks and new features come alongside a slew of bug fixes, with the team saying they managed to close out more than 300 Bugzilla entries in the past couple of months. The full list of these bug fixes can be found here.

Work on digiKam 7.2.0 is already underway with a few features planned, including improved support for face management. The team says there are some beta releases coming up that will test new planned features. As always, digiKam is available to download for free.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Open-source photo management app digiKam gets major update to version 7.0.0

29 Jul

Open source photo management software digiKam has been updated to version 7.0.0, an update that has been a full year in the making. The updated digiKam adds a number of new features and bug fixes, according to the team behind the software, including an important update to the software’s face-detection capability, which now utilizes deep learning technology to better detect both human and animal faces.

The neural network model now used for digiKam’s face detection feature can detect faces in a variety of states and arrangements, including profile shots, burred faces, faces partially obstructed by other objects like sunglasses and more. The digiKam team says that testing the updated feature with ‘huge collections’ revealed a high level of accuracy resulting in few false positives.

Though the workflow for this updated face recognition function remains the same, the digiKam team notes that users will need to train the neural network to recognize the faces of the people they often photograph by tagging them in multiple images. In cases where the algorithm isn’t trained, detected faces are instead marked as ‘unknown.’

Other improvements are coming to the face detection tool and related workflow, as well. Users will soon be able to tell digiKam to ignore certain faces using the Reject button. The software will pin Important face tags in the sidebar and automatically assign face tag icons for a faster, more visual workflow. These features, as well as a handful of others, are being worked on over this summer.

Another project underway for digiKam is improvements to the software’s face recognition neural network engine. The algorithm will be updated to implement new face classifiers for faster and more accurate facial recognition, plus it will receive a new face embedding database and more. The code with these changes is expected to arrive sometime this summer, according to the team, which says that’ll likely drop with digiKam version 7.2.0.

Beyond those face recognition changes and planned changes, digiKam 7.0.0 brings LibRaw 0.20, the new version of this library that enables the software to post-process a variety of raw camera files.

With this update, digiKam has gained support for more than 40 additional raw image formats, including ones from cameras like the Sony A7R4, DJI Mavic Air, Ricoh GR III, PhaseOne IQ4 150MP, GoPro HERO7, and more, including several smartphone models. Users can find the full list of supported formats, including the 0.20 additions, on the LibRaw website.

The changes in digiKam 7.0.0 continue from there, including the addition of improved support for the HEIF image format via the use of the libheif shared library, new support for Microsoft Visual C++ with the goal of an eventual Windows Store release, official support for FlatPak Linux bundle, expanded metadata options, a new ‘HTML5Responsive’ theme for the HTMLGallery plugin, new settings for the SlideShow tool and much more.

Ultimately, the digiKam team explains that over the past year, they reached a new and ‘impressive’ level of development for the software beyond what they have achieved in the past. The update is extensive, adding considerable support and new features to what remains a very powerful open-source alternative to commercial photo management software.

As expected, digiKam 7.0.0 is available to download for free with support for Windows, macOS and Linux.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Open source image editing program digiKam now has video support, new export tools and more

22 Feb

digiKam is an open-source photo management application that runs on Linux, Windows, and MacOS platforms and comes with tools for importing, managing, editing, and sharing photos and raw files.

Now version 6.0.0 of digiKam has been released after a 2-year development phase and comes with a heap of new features and improvements.

The biggest news is that the software can now also handle video files, offering many of the importing, sharing and editing functions that are also available for still image. Videos can also be played back without the need for an external player.

In addition import/export web-service tools are now available across all modules in digiKam – LightTable, Image editor and Showfoto. The same is true for other tools, such as metadata and geolocation editors, allowing for a more seamless user experience.

There are also new tools to export your images directly to Pinterest as well as the Microsoft OneDrive and Box cloud storage services, and the Raw engine has been updated to process images from a long list of new cameras and smartphone.

In addition to the new features the digiKam team says it has been able to clean the applications code in order to simplify application compilation, packaging and maintenance for the future.

For a full list of new features and supported cameras, download links and more detail about the work that has gone into the update, head over to the digiKam website.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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