Tue Sep 12, 2017

digiKam 5.7.0 is released

by digiKam Team

Following the release of 5.6.0 published in June, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.7.0 of the digiKam Software Collection. In this version a lot of work has happened behind the scenes and in fixing bugs, which does not mean there is no enhancements: A new tool to create print layouts has been introduces, albums can now be exported by mail, support for Hugin 2017 was added and GPS traces are storable as KML.

Bugs Triage

We updated the bugs categories and went through all of them to reassign them to the correct category and find no longer valid or duplicate bugs. The immediate result of this is an enormous list of resolved issues in this release. However this is not the main benefit: The change makes it both easier for issue reporters to find an appropriate category as well as for developers to get an overview and find issues relevant to specific parts of the code.

Print Creator

This wizard allows you to print multiple images in various configurations. If the aspect ratio does not fit the printing format, you can choose which part of the image to crop (if at all). The result can be sent directly to a printer, to GIMP or to a file. The tool is available in all modes: Main view, light table, editor and showFoto through the tools menu. In the main view it is also accessible in the right sidebar in the tools tab.

Send by Mail

The long awaited tool to send pictures by email is here. You can set an upper limit to the email size, convert images on the fly and remove all metadata from the files. The supported email clients are visible on the screenshot above. As the Print Creator, this tool is accessible throughout the program.

Google Summer of Code 2017 Students

The time of the four students working on digiKam has ended officially. They have handed in their final report, but it will hopefully not be their final contribution. They have made real progress for digiKam and we hope they will continue helping making this software better. You can find a description and their final report on the official GSoC project page. We want to thank Yingjie Liu, Swati Lodha, Shaza Ismail Kaoud and Ahmed Fathy for their contributions!

Randa Meetings

The digiKam team was again invited to take part in the Randa Meetings. In this tiny town in the Swiss alps a lot of KDE developers work on improving their software. This years topic is accessibility, meaning make the software usable for as many users as possible, e.g. visual impaired people. Being able to meet team members face-to-face and profit from input of many experienced coders is extremely valuable. Please consider supporting the Randa Meetings to make sure that such events will continue in the future to make our software better. For the digiKam team represented at the event the main focus is on incorporating some of the GSoC projects as the media server dedicated to share collection contents on local network with compatible DLNA devices or applications, as tablets, phones, TV, etc. See below a shot of testing session sharing photo with a DLNA application runing on iPad.

Final Words

We already started to incorporate the astonishing work of our Google Summer of Code participants. It will take some time to get it to work as we want and put on the polish - things look promising for the next major release to version 6. The next minor release 5.8.0 will follow towards November.

As always, but especially noteworthy this time, you can look at the list of 505 resolved issues for detailed information.

digiKam 5.7.0 Software collection source code tarball, Linux 32/64 bits AppImage bundles, MacOS package, and Windows 32/64 bits installers can be downloaded from this repository.

Happy digiKaming while capturing lovely autumn colours!