digiKam 7.9.0 is released

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After four months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.9.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.

Bundles Internal Component Updates

As with the previous releases, we take care about upgrading the internal components from the Bundles. Microsoft Windows Installer, Apple macOs Package, and Linux AppImage binaries now hosts:

• Qt frameworks 5.15.7 LTS.
• KDE frameworks 5.99.0.
• Libraw snapshot 20221123.
• ExifTool 12.51.
• GMicQt 3.1.6.

All of these components include important stability improvements and fixes.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now used to compile the AppImage for a better backward binary compatibility with the Linux distributions.

Maintenance and Improvements

This new version arrives with 97 triaged and closed files in bugzilla.

See below a list of major improvements included in this release:

• Fix of Google photo login and remote album management.
• Better management of faces location from metadata.
• Database schema migration backward compatibility.
• Better support of coordinates import from metadata.
• Better ISO date format support from metadata.
• Better performance with album management from a remote database.
• Fix application window positions under Microsoft Windows.
• Better Tags import and merge with items metadata.

The application internationalization has also been updated. digiKam and Showfoto are proposed with 57 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.

Future Plans

We are close to releasing the first 8.0.0-beta1 in a few weeks before Christmas for a plan to target a final 8.0.0 in April 2023. We have already published an 8.0.0 alpha through a weekly release mechanism and receive good feedback from testers. During the 7 to 8 transition we will maintain a little bit of the 7.x series with a new 7.10.0 version if necessary, including the last most important bug-fixes discovered.

8.0.0 is ported to the new Qt6 framework and it is still compatible with Qt5. All new important features are hosted to this code. This summer we have mentored two students working on:

• Image Quality Analyzer using a neural network.
• New plugin to perform OCR over images using Tesseract.

Both projects are now finalized and integrated to 8.0.0.

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 7.9.0 can be downloaded from this repository as:

• Source code tarball.
• Linux 64 bits AppImage bundles compatible with systems based on glibc >= 2.27.
• Windows 64 bits installers or bundle archives.
• macOS Intel packages compatible with Apple M1 and M2 CPU computers using Rosetta 2,

Rendez-vous in a few weeks for the first major digiKam 8.0.0-beta1 release.

Happy digiKaming.