360Photography

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)