Once again a lot has been going on behind the scenes since the last release. The HTML gallery tool is back, database shrinking (e.g. purging stale thumbnails) is also supported on MySQL, grouping has been improved and additional sidecars can now be specified. Therefore the release of 5.6.0 will be (is already) delayed, as we would like to invite you to test all these features. As usual they are available in the pre-release bundles or obviously directly from the git repository.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.digikam.org/news/2017-05-23-5.6.0-pre-release/
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Testing it right now. Works great!
- âopen withâ menu works (which is new for an appimage
- video thumbnails and video preview works just fine
Testing the W64 version and so far so good! Thanks for it.
Although digikam is a great DAM (I would say quite a bit better then the DAM of darktable or rawtherapee although those are workable) the RAW processor still isnât that great. So it would be nice if digikam had a bit more options to work with external programs that handle RAW themselves.
Since âopen withâ already works and the batch queue has the possibility to run shell scripts the only option missing there is to skip RAW processing and feed the RAW file directly to the script (both darktable and rawtherapee have cli only versions). The only thing missing then is to mark this output as a new âversionâ and/or âthumbnailâ for the RAW file (albeit grouping is an ok workaround for now). Another more extensive suggestion can be found in this bug 374655 â Working with raw processors
Anyway thanks for your hard work!
I am loving the feature to âattachâ 3rd party sidecars to images in digikam 
The group feature exist already some time, but I didnât find it until yet. Itâs really cool 
But the group mode is not like in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ6g6PO9WTc
The Problem of the grouping from 5.6.0 is, if there exist multiple versions like pic1.jpg, pic1_01.jpg there is no possibility to group them by name.
I think there should be an option when a new picture was exported for example by darktable (digikam already recognizes that there is a new picture) digikam should add this picture automatically to the group.
In the preview you donât see which pictures are grouped together. I think it should be made more visible which picture are in the same group.
Is it possible with this version to add metadata fields like coverage, identifier and personinimage? These are requested by my employer. I checked them on the settings page of digikam, but I canât find them back in the edit metadata window, and on the right it still says ânot availableâ :(.
Unfortunately the full patch including custom regex was never merged, as it was considered not user friendly. Currently when grouping by filename the entire filename except the extension must be equal. Grouping pictures automatically was never part of this and would have to be done from scratch.
identifier is available in xmp â status, the others I couldnât find. Exiv2 (metadata backend) supports both, so they could be incorporated. personInImage doesnât really make sense to have as a separate field, that could/should probably be added to the face tagging functionality. You can open an issue in the bugtracker about this.
The ones I mentioned are all very much used by image databases, agencies etc. In fact, my current employer (a university) demands them and unless Digikam offers these fields (coverage, identifier,personinimage,publisher) I will have to buy Lightroom, just to be able to add these fields :(.
I am pretty sure you can create whatever tag you want in XMP. Play with metadata viewer and editor in digikam. Even if digikam canât do that (which I doubt) you can write a script to copy info from existing fields like people tags as a new tag using exiftool
I hate to disappoint, but unfortunately digiKam does only show all xmp properties in the right sidebar, but these arenât editable. The metadata editor has a fixed set of properties that can be edited. Comments, ratings and tags can be written to any kind of xmp, exif or iptc property via the advanced metadata configuration. Thatâs what is possible at the moment (it is to be extended, but as with almost everything in digiKam (well open source) dev power is needed).
Exiv2 can edit XMP metadata (and IPTC and Exif). I donât know anything about digiKam.
That is entirely digiKam restriction. Any additional properties could either be added to the metadata editor or the right sidebar could be made editable - itâs just a matter of (missing) dev time.
Can Exiv2 write custom tags to XMP ?
I belive Exiv2 can read and write custom tags. Exiv2/XMP support is a wrapper over the Adobe XMPsdk. I know for certain you can add your own namespace (in addition to almost 60 which are predefined). There would be no point in adding a namespace if you could not define your own tag! So, Iâm 99+% confident that you can define your own tag.
Exiv2 enables you to read/delete/add/modify most tags in Exif, IPTC and XMP format. There are a few protected tags which are part of the image. For example, although the image width and height (in pixels) is metadata, it cannot be modified by Exiv2 as it would involve scaling/resampling the image. There are many other libraries which provide such pixel twiddling capability.
I can confirm that Exiv2 can add custom tags, we do that in darktable.
@Jack_Tummers digiKam uses Exiv2 library for reading/writing still imagesâ metadata. Since Exiv2 is able to read/write all XMP tags per AdobeXMPsk including custom tags digiKam with some patches should be able to do that too. I guess opening a file in KDE bugzilla would be the best option for now.