News, Tutorials, Howtos for Ubuntu Linux
Darktable, the popular free open-source photography software and RAW developer, released new 5.0.1 version one day ago.
This is a maintenance release that includes various bug-fixes, some performance improvements, and updates camera devices and profiles support.
Darktable, the popular raw image processing software, released new 4.8.1 version few days ago.
This is the first minor release for the current 4.8 release series, which contains only bug-fixes. The release fixed the issue that export without high quality sampling but with up-scaling activated, crash when using the -d imageio option, and image jump if collection is empty.
There are as well fixes for importing/exporting issues, including large image exports due to a bug in finalscale module, JPEG2000 loading issue due to unspecified color space, and empty lighttable when importing from command-line. For more, see the official release note.
Darktable, the free open-source raw image processing software, released new 4.8.0 version this Friday!
Darktable 4.8.0 introduced a few new modules. They include the color equalizer module, allowing to control hue, lightness, and/or saturation based on colors.
There are as well new Enlarge Canvas module, allowing to add areas on top, bottom, left, and/or right of the image, and fill with different colors, or some other part of the image by using Retouch module.
By drag-and-dropping from the filmstrip to the new Overlay module, it can now add overlay on top of current image. And, the overlay can be scaled, rotated and shifted horizontally or vertically.
Darktable 4.8.0 Enlarge Canvas and Color Equalizer
This tutorial shows how to enable .jxl file support for system image viewer, GIMP, and some other apps in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, and even Ubuntu 18.04.
JPEG-XL is a new image format by JPEG committee. It supports both lossy and lossless compression, and includes features such as animation, alpha channels, layers, thumbnails, and has better compression efficiency (60% improvement) comparing to JPEG.
For encoding and decoding JPEG-XL images, there’s a free open-source libjxl library available. Ubuntu has included the library in system repository since 24.04, however lacks GdkPixbuf loader plugin until Ubuntu 24.10 (still in development so far).
Meaning system default image viewer, and many other apps do not work with .jxl file in current 3 Ubuntu LTS releases out-of-the-box.
gThumb image viewer and organizer released new 3.12.5 release this Sunday. It is a small release only contains translation updates and a few bug-fixes.
Bug fixes in the release include:
Nothing else!
This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest version of libheif library, for better HEIF and AVIF image formats support, in Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 22.04 and/or Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Libheif is a popular free open-source library for encoding and decoding HEIF and AVIF. Which, also has partial support for JPEG-in-HEIF, JPEG2000, uncompressed (ISO/IEC 23001-17:2023) capabilities.
It supports libde265 and/or ffmpeg for decoding HEIC images, and x265/kvazaar for encoding. For AVIF images, it uses either AOM/dav1d for decoding, and AOM/rav1e/svt-av1 for encoding support.
As well, it has command line tools to convert HEIF/HEIC to other images, and convert images to HEIF/HEIC.
Many popular applications, including GIMP, Darktable, ImageMagick, Krita, and gThumb, use libheif for HEIF and/or AVIF support. And, the library is usually installed as dependency along with them.
gThumb use libheif for AVIF support
Darkable, the popular photography app and raw developer, released new major 4.6.0 version a day ago!
The new release introduced auto-save feature for editing history. By default, it save changes every 10 seconds. User can go to ‘Preferences -> storage‘ to change the time interval, or set it to 0 to disable it.
Darktable 4.6.0 also features new rgb primaries processing module. It allows delicate color corrections and creative color grading, by moving the red, green and blue primary colors around using “hue” and “purity” controls.
Darktable 4.6.0
The release also has a big performance improvements. OpenCL is now initialized in the background to speed up the app launching. Image display speed in the map view has been increased by 25%. And, the chromatic aberrations module is now approximagely 10% faster when run on the CPU.
Other changes in Darktable 4.6.0 include:
Option 1: Snap
Darktable is easy to install as Snap package, which runs in sandbox, using Ubuntu Software (or App Center for 23.10).
Option 2: Official deb package
The developer team offers official RPM and DEB packages for Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE, through the OBS building repository.
Also, it’s NOT updated to v4.6.0 at the moment of writing. Keep an eye on this page if you prefer the official package.
Option 3: Flatpak package
Darktable is also available to install as Flatpak package, another universal Linux package format runs in sandbox!
Linux Mint 21 user can directly search for and install the Flatpak package from Software Manager.
While, Ubuntu user can open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run the 2 commands below one by one to install the Flatpak:
sudo apt install flatpak
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.darktable.Darktable.flatpakref
Option 4: Ubuntu PPA
Besides using the official DEB package (See Option 2), I’ve also upload the package into this unofficial PPA for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 23.04, and Ubuntu 23.10.
NOTE: The PPA includes updated libheif (1.16.2) library for Darktable to support HEIF in Ubuntu 22.04. Please report if it’s running into conflict with other packages in your system!!
1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to add PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/darktable
2. Linux Mint needs to update system package cache manually after adding PPA:
sudo apt update
3. Finally, install Darktable 4.6.0 via command:
sudo apt install darktable
In addition for old Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, & 16.04, keep an eye on this PPA. However, it has tons of updated libraries that MAY run into dependency hell and/or package conflict!
Depends on which package your installed, remove Darktable via one of the commands below:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.darktable.Darktable
Then run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove unused runtime libraries.
sudo apt remove --autoremove darktable
And remove the Ubuntu PPA repository if you want via command:
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/darktable
digiKam, KDE’s photo management software, released version 8.2.0 this Sunday.
The new release includes most recent Libraw library, updates runtime libraries to Qt 5.15.11, KDE frameworks 5.110, Exiftool 12.70, and Exiv2 28.1.
For Windows user, digiKam now has new Windows installer compiled under Windows with VCPKG tool-chain and based on Qt6 and KF6 frameworks.
Besides toolkit updates, digiKam 8.2.0 also has about 250 bug-fixes. They include slow Geolocate, tags not saving on exit, failed to database creation on MariaDB, slideshow does not prevent monitor turning off, various crashes, and other bugs. See NEWS file for more details.
The software provides official packages for Linux, Windows, and MacOS, available to download at the link below:
For Linux, it’ non-install AppImage. Just download it, add executable permission, and run it to launch the photo manager.
digiKam is also available to install as Flatpak package. Linux Mint 21 can directly search for & install it from Software Manager.
While, Debian/Ubuntu users can install it via:
sudo apt install flatpak
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.kde.digikam.flatpakref
To uninstall the Flatpak package, open terminal and run command:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.kde.digikam
Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-time libraries.
Looking for app to convert your photo images into other formats? Try Switcheroo.
For batch image processing, I’d recommend to use Converseen. However, stupid simple applications are always good choices for beginners.
And, Switcheroo is one stupid simple app for converting photo images, while having modern look and feel in today’s Linux desktop.
Click ‘Open Images’ or drag’n’drop files into app window
With it, just click “Open Images” button and choose your image file/files, or drag and drop files into the app window to open them.
It shows thumbnail preview of all opened images, along with delete buttons in top-right for each images.
By using top-left ‘+’ button, user can add more images (Tips: hold Ctrl or Shift can select multiple files). And, ‘≡’ menu even provides an option to paste images from clipboard.
After opening all your photo images, click the drop-down box in the right of “Export Format” to select which file format to convert to.
At the moment of writing, it support converting image to PNG, JPG, WEBP, HEIF, HEIC, BMP, AVIF, JXL, TIFF, PDF, GIF. Though, you have to either use top-right hamburger menu or press Ctrl + H to show less popular file types.
The app’s hamburger menu
Before clicking ‘Convert’, it provides few more options, such as set background color, resize with or without aspect ratio, and change image quality. There’s also “Save To Zip” to directly output images into ZIP archive.
Instead of providing an in-app option, it pops-up file chooser dialog asks to choose where to save output images or ZIP archive, once clicking “Convert” button.
The app is available as universal Flatpak package, that can be installed in Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch, Chrome OS, and most other Linux, even including the mobile device, such as PinePhone.
1. First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. When it opens, run command to install the Flatpak daemon:
sudo apt install flatpak
Other Linux can follow the official setup guide to get Flatpak support.
2. Then, run command to install the app as flatpak:
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/io.gitlab.adhami3310.Converter.flatpakref
As you see in the screenshot, the downside is that a small app can have 1 GB downloading due to run-time libraries (though shared).
3. Once installed, search for and launch it from your system application launcher, start menu, or ‘Activities’ overview depends on desktop environment.
First time installing Flatpak app needs a log out and back in, to make app icon visible.
4. To enable drag’n’drop support, you need to grant access permission to the folders that contain the photo images.
To do so, install Flatseal, then use it to allow access either all user files or certain folders (by adding Other files).
To uninstall the image converting application, also open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T), then run command:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data io.gitlab.adhami3310.Converter
Also run flatpak uninstall --unused to remove useless run-time libraries.
Shotwell photo viewer and organizer released new 0.32.3 version a day ago with minor updates.
The release came with some bug-fixes and minor changes, they include:
As well, there’s new/updated translations included in this release. They include: id.po, courtesy of Andika Triwidada; eu.po, courtesy of Asier Sarasua Garmendia; hu.po, courtesy of Balázs Úr; sl.po, courtesy of Martin Srebotnjak.
Shotwell is available to install in Ubuntu via a few different ways.
Snap package
Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) maintains Shotwell as Snap package, which runs in sandbox. However, it’s stuck at 0.32.1 at the moment of writing.
The snap package is available to install in Ubuntu Software (or App Center for 23.10).
Flatpak package
Shotwell is also available to install as Flatpak package, another universal Linux package format runs in sandbox. It’s marked as maintained by the Shotwell developers, but NOT verified.
The Flatpak is at version of 0.32.2 at the moment of writing (check HERE). Ubuntu user can press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal, and run 2 commands one by one to install it:
sudo apt install flatpak
flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/org.gnome.Shotwell.flatpakref
Ubuntu PPA
For those who prefer the classic native .deb package format, I’ve upload the package into this unofficial PPA for Ubuntu 22.04, 23.04, and 23.10.
1. First, search for and open terminal from your system application menu, or press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/shotwell
Type user password (no asterisk feedback) when it asks and hit Enter to continue.
2. Next, launch Software Updater (Update Manager), then install the updates for the software package.
Or, run command in terminal to install/upgrade the Shotwell package:
sudo apt install shotwell
NOTE: Linux Mint user may need to run sudo apt update first to refresh package cache.
Finally, either right-click on your photo images to select open with the photo manager, or search for and launch shotwell from ‘Activities’ overview and enjoy!
For any issue, it’s recommended to purge the Ubuntu PPA. Which, will remove PPA and downgrade shotwell to the pre-installed version.
To do so, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:
sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/shotwell
For the Snap package, just remove it from Ubuntu Software or App Center. While, Flatpak package can be removed by running the command below in a terminal window:
flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.gnome.Shotwell
