digiKam team has announced the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.1.0 one week ago, with many fixes since the stable v4.0.0. According to the announcement, the new release contains below changes:
A huge hack about face management feature have been processed. Some conditions introducing are now closed. Implementations in shared library libkface dedicated to detect and recognize faces are now more robust and suitable for production.
A new overlay have been add to all icon-view to indicate if items has geo-location information. This will help end users to find quickly in album which items use GPS coordinates.
Thumbnails now support large resolution monitor. Thumbs size can be expended to 512 instead 256 previously.
Install / Upgrade to digiKam 4.1.0:
digiKam 4.1.0 depends on the latest opencv 2.4.9 which is not yet available in Ubuntu repository. Fortunately, a third-party PPA, maintained by Philip Johnsson has built them for Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty LTS.
To add the PPA and install digiKam 4.1.0, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open the terminal. When it opens, run commands below one by one:
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:
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.
