The photo management software digiKam 4.0.0 has reached its third beta release just a few hours ago. There will be also beta4 and RC releases, and the digiKam 4.0.0 final will be released on May 11.
According to the release notes, following new features will be added in this version:
A new tool dedicated to organize whole tag hierarchies. This new feature is relevant of GoSC-2013 project from Veaceslav Munteanu. This project include also a back of Nepomuk support in digiKam broken since a while due to important KDE API changes. Veaceslav has also implemented multiple selection and multiple drag-n-drop capabilities on Tags Manager and Tags View from sidebars, and the support for writing face rectangles metadata in Windows Live Photo format.
A new maintenance tool dedicated to parse image quality and auto-tags items automatically using Pick Labels. This tool is relevant to anotherGoSC-2013 project from Gowtham Ashok. This tool require feedback and hack to be finalized for this release.
Showfoto thumbbar is now ported to Qt model/view in order to switch later full digiKam code to Qt5. This project is relevant to another GoSC-2013 project from Mohamed Anwer.
A lots of work have been done into Import tool to fix several dysfunctions reported since a very long time. For example, The status to indicate which item have been already downloaded from the device is back. Thanks to Teemu Rytilahti and Islam Wazery to contribute. All fixes are not yet completed and the game continue until the next beta release.
This release is now fully ported to Qt4 model-view and drop last Q3-Support classes. The last pending part was Image Editor Canvas ported and completed by Yiou Wang through this GoSC-2013 project. In the future, port to Qt5 will be easy and quickly done, when KDE 5 API will stabilized and released.
Install:
Besides building digiKam 4.0 from the source tarball. Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy users can install the beta release from the third-party PPA.
Press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open a terminal window. When it opens, run the commands below to add the digiKam Beta repository:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:msylwester/digikam-beta
There’s also a stable PPA created by the maintainer. It will provide the digiKam 4.0.0 final build for Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy and Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty. To add this PPA, run:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:msylwester/digikam
After adding the PPA, run the commands below to update package lists and install digiKam:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install digikam
That’s it. Check out the PPA packages on Launchpad page.