digiKam 8.4.0 is released
Dear digiKam fans and users,
After five months of active maintenance and long bugs triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.4.0 of its open source digital photo manager.
Long time bugs present in older versions have been fixed and we spare a lot of time to contact users to validate changes in pre-release to confirm fixes before deploying the program in production.
The application internationalization has also been updated. digiKam and Showfoto are proposed with 61 different languages for the graphical interface. Go to Settings/Configure Languages dialog and change the localization as you want. Applications need to be restarted to apply changes. If you want to contribute to the internationalization of digiKam, please contact the translator teams, following the translation how-to. The statistics about translation states are available here.
Thanks to the translators who have worked on the online documentation internationalisations which is now available in 15 languages as French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and more. You can read and search over the document here. You are welcome to contribute to application handbook translations following the coordination team instructions.
Internal Components Update
Libraw Processor
This version arrives with the internal RAW decoder Libraw updated to the rolling-release snapshot 2024-07-11. This includes a list of new camera supported:
- Canon EOS R6 Mark II, EOS R8, EOS R50, EOS R100, EOS Ra.
- Fujifilm GFX100-II, X-T5, X-S20, X-H2, X-H2S.
- Hasselblad X2D-100c.
- Leica Q3, M11 Monochrom.
- Nikon Z30, Z8.
- OM Digital OM-5.
- Panasonic DC-G9 II, DC-ZS200D / ZS220D, DC-TZ200D / TZ202D / TZ220D, DC-S5-II, DC-GH6.
- Sony A7C-II, A7CR, ILCE-6700, ZV-1M2, ZV-E1, ILCE-7RM5 (A7R-V), ILME-FX30, DSC-HX95, A1.
- Multiple DJI and Skydio drones.
- Multiple smartphones with DNG format recorded.
DNG Toolkit
The DNG toolkit from Adobe has been also updated to last 1.7.1 including the JPEG-XL compression support to reduce the size of the digital negative container.
LensFun Toolkit
digiKam now supports the new LensFun 0.4 toolkit API of this library planned this year. Important simplifications and improvements have been introduced in LensFun, and digiKam have been fixed to still be compatible with the camera lens database provided by this important open-source library.
Media Player
For the Qt5 version of digiKam, the internal QtAVPlayer has been updated to the latest rolling-release snapshot 2024-06-16. For the Qt6, the media player is now able to advance video frame by frame.
ExifTool and Exiv2
For the metadata management, the famous ExifTool open source component has been updated in all bundles to the last 12.88 release. Also the other very important metadata shared library Exiv2 has been updated to last 0.28.2.
Qt and KDE Frameworks
The Linux AppImage and the Windows versions which are proposed in two versions based on Qt6 and Qt5 are now published with the last stable 6.7.2 and 5.15.14. KDE framework has been updated respectively to 6.2.0 and 5.116.
New Features
Automatic Tagging Online Translations
With the 8.3.0 release, the auto-tag’s new feature has been proposed to create new keywords based on image contents. After the photo content analysis by a deep-learning engine with a pre-trained model, the tool is able to detect forms, objects, places, animals, plants, monuments, scenes, and more. It generates a series of English tags parented with the Auto branch in the database. The user must review all new items pre-tagged by the engine to validate the contents detection.
With the 8.4.0, a new option allows to automatically call an online translator to generate the corresponding keywords in your prefered languages.
GMIC-Qt 3.4.0 Update And New G’MIC processor For The Batch Queue Manager
GMIC-Qt is a popular 3rd-partin enhancement plugin for the digiKam Image Editor and Showfoto which provides more than 600 effects to apply on your photos. The G’MIC 3.4.0 release announcement list all the new features available for this powerful tool The online documentation resume well all the capabilities offers by this tool for the digiKam users.
A missing feature since a very long time in digiKam was to be able to apply the G’MIC processor filters on a series of photos in one step. This is now possible with the digiKam 8.4.0 Batch Queue Manager.
The new Batch Queue Manager online documentation section give all details about how to use this new tool in your collections.
Future Plans
Next maintenance version is planned to be published in october 2024 with more bug fixes and improvements.
We plan to port the macOS package to the last Qt and KDE frameworks version 6 as the Windows and Linux version.
Final Words
Thanks to all users for your support and donations, and to all contributors, students, testers who allowed us to improve this release.
digiKam 8.4.0 can be downloaded from this repository as:
- Source code tarball.
- Linux 64 bits AppImage bundles compatible with systems based on glibc >= 2.31.
- Windows 10 (or later) 64 bits installers or bundle archives.
- macOS Intel packages compatible with Apple Silicon CPU computers using Rosetta 2,
Rendez-vous in a few months for the next digiKam 8.5.0 maintenance release.
Have fun with digiKam…