gerhard's blog

Here is a joke of a review titled 'Ubuntu Photo Manager Experiment'. It even fails at wanting to compare FOSS software against Aperture as it compares mainly non-FOSS programs. It ignores digiKam and ufraw, krita.
But read the reader comments below the article and on Slashdot: digiKam is by far the recommended solution!

Dear all digiKam fans and users!

The digiKam development team is happy to release 0.9.4-beta1. The digiKam tarball can be downloaded from SourceForge as well.

Note! This release works only with the latest libkdcraw and libkexiv2. You either have to compile them freshly from svn or wait a few days until the tarballs become available.

NEW FEATURES:

General :
1. Color theme scheme are pervasively applied in graphical interfaces, giving digiKam a real Pro-look when dark schemes are selected.
1a. Color theme scheme can be changed from either Editor or LightTable.

DigiKam has come a long way since the early beginnings in 2002. It has come of age and deserves new cloths or a new 'corporate design' in today's parlance.

To find a new slogan, a new logo, iconized slash screen and web design has been itching me and others for quite a while now. But those are sensitive and difficult subjects, in particular for us amateurs in that field.

A contest is herewith opened to create such new cloths, closing end of march 2008. We shall then make a pre-selection and vote on the best candidates. I will act as coordinator and point of contact. Please supply your proposals to gerhard at kulzer dot net.

Guide lines:

• Photography and FOSS should be the general context.

The German computer magazine c't will publish a special issue (subject: Mac) which includes a CD ROM with corresponding freeware and shareware programs (publishing date: April 2008). Your software "digiKam" has been pre-selected to be put on this CD ROM.

-> Link to the magazine's introduction of digiKam.

Dear all digiKam users,
the team is really proud to deliver just in time for Xmas the final. The tarball can be downloaded from SourceForge. Don't forget to update Exiv2 to last stable release 0.15 for digiKam to compile successfully.

Many, many thanks go to Gilles, Marcel, Arnd, Mik, Fabien and all the others who worked hard to create this great new release. This release sends a big parcel of useability improvements under your Xmas tree: If it was not already, organizing and navigation have become a snap now with the quick filters, drag&drop and GOTO features on top of an optimized lightable.

digiKam 0.9.3 - Release date: 2007-12-23

The digiKam team releases 0.9.3-rc1. The tarball can preferably be downloaded from SourceForge.

There is again a new very practical feature integrated:
In the Albums/Tags/Searches/TagsFilter sidebars the is a live filter at the
bottom that lets you search for a string in Albums/Tags/Searches/TagsFilter
hierarchy, much as amarok does it int he collections.

A word on stability. I know that many of you wait until a 'stable' sees the
day of light in order to upgrade digiKam. I will not tell you to do
otherwise. But! I update digikam daily per cron job from svn since 4 years

The digiKam releases 0.9.3-beta3 and its English documentation. The tarballs can preferably be downloaded from SourceForge.

New Features

1. The main window has yet another live filter: The new string search filters the current view (album/collection, date, tags, search) on substrings within file name, caption, and tags. This feature is really convenient and completes the file type filter and rating filter introduced in previous 0.9.3-betas.
2. Several usability improvements in the Light Table
3. A green tint has been added to the b&w conversion plugin

The digiKam team is proud to release 0.9.3-beta2. The tarball can also be downloaded from SourceForge.

This is not only a bug fix but, due to the development in the KDE4 branch, a few nice new features have been backported to this KDE3 release.

New Features

Two quick filters have been added to the status bar of the main window:

• A mime-type selector to filter for one of JPEG, PNG, TIFF, RAW, movies or audio files
• A rating filter to select rated images

Dear all digiKam fans and users!

The digiKam development team is happy to release 0.9.3-beta1. The digiKam tarball can be downloaded from SourceForge as well.
(0.9.3 will probably be the last release before we will switch over to KDE4 which will see a totally revamped digiKam.)

New features of the camera interface:

• The camera interface is now used to import new images into collections.
• There are new options to download pictures and delete them from the camera at the same time.
• Support of Drag & Drop to download files from camera window to album window.

Dear all digiKam fans!
Some minor regression bugs led us to another release, the 0.9.2-beta3 release including an improved light table (full size images). The 0.9.2 final release is on track for mid June publishing. This beta3 version is rock-solid, don't hesitate to use it for production.

In order to make digiKam 0.9.2-beta3 compile you need to compile and install libkexiv2 and libkdcraw first (unless you complied them for beta[1,2] already).

The library tarballs can be downloaded from (1) SourceForge.