After two years of development, digiKam 5.0 stable was finally released one day ago with fully Qt5 port.
In addition to code porting, digiKam 5.0 now uses many Qt dependencies instead of KDE dependencies. To provide a pure Qt5 version of digiKam in the future, around 80% of KDE dependencies have been removed, 10% become optional for Linux Desktop. This simplifies the porting job and code maintenance on Windows, OS X, and other operating systems.
Other changes in digiKam 5.0:
- remove KIO-slaves, instead a multi-threaded implementation is used to query the database
- use virtual trash folder, accessible from album tree, instead of KDE desktop trash
- improve metadata workflow in digiKam with a new Lazy Synchronization Tool
- port kipi-plugins to Qt5
- The whole database code has been reviewed, polished, cleaned, and documented.
- database configuration panel rewritten
- possible to setup MySQL datebase at first run
For more details, read the official release note.
How to Install digiKam 5.0 in (K)Ubuntu:
Philip Johnsson is maintaining a PPA with digiKam binary for Ubuntu. Now digiKam 5.0 is available in the PPA for Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 15.10, and derivatives.
1. Add PPA.
Open terminal emulator and paste the command below and run:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip5/extra
Type in your password when it asks. There’s no visual feedback on password typing, so just type in mind and hit Enter.
2. Now search for and install digikam5 using your package manager after refresh package caches.
Or just run the commands below one by one in terminal:
sudo apt update sudo apt install digikam5
The digiKam5 packages is independent of previous digiKam 4.x. You may have both version installed at the same time.
The digiKam5 packages is independent of previous digiKam 4.x. You may export your data from version 4.x and
exportimport to the version 5.0.Could you explain how to do that please?
Digikam 5 can use the same databases as digikam 4 (they are in fact the same and haven’t changed for SQLite). Just point Digikam 5 to your Digikam 4 database and go on. The packages in my PPA are made so you can have both Digikam 4.14 and Digikam 5 installed on the same system (that’s because of feedback from users of my PPA that they want to gradually go over to Digikam 5 and keep using Digikam 4 for a while). The Digikam 4 and 5 packages share some common files like icons and therefor they become dependent of each other as packages. You can even use your old configure files from Digikam 4 in Digikam 5 BUT in some odd cases this can make Digikam 5 behave oddly or crash therefor it isn’t it standard for Digikam 5 to just copy the old files yet. To do it manually anyway check out this bug report what files to copy and move if this is something you want to do.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364258#c7
Also. If you start Digikam 5 in a non-KDE/Plasma desktop environment that haven’t used KDE/Plasma before you will most likely not see any icons in the Digikam 5 GUI. To fix this you need to tell Digikam 5 to use a icon theme. Do this and you should have a Digikam 5 GUI as it was ment to be.
Install digikam5 and start it. No icons will appear. Go into Digikam 5 menu Settings > Configure > Miscellaneous and change from the blank setting of “Icon theme” to Breeze. Restart Digikam 5. Now you should see icons in the Digikam 5 GUI.
just one question, can I use digikam5 with ubuntu 14.04?
best regards, Miel
Go to http://download.kde.org/stable/digikam/, select download the latest .appimage, then right-click run the file will launch digiKam 5.x
thanks, you are a gentleman.