Following the release of 5.8.0 published in January, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.9.0 of the digiKam Software Collection. In this last version of 5.x, we has focused all developements to close bugs.
Improvements and Fixes Many small fixes has been commited over XMP sidecar support in this release but the most important works will be tested with next main release has these requires regression tests.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.digikam.org/news/2018-03-25-5.9.0_release_announcement/
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Thank you digikam developers for doing such a great work! I have been using digikam since version 4.12 but I can’t even imagine the amount of coding you have done to make 5.9.0 which is many many steps ahead.
6.0.0 looks promising but it is spring and summer is on its away so make sure you are out there making nice shots 
My sincere thanks for this. I just started using digiKam about 3 months ago and it’s really helped me get my photo organization habits to a much better place.
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First of all, thank you for the continuous digikam development. This is really a very useful piece of software.
I would appreciate, if you could continue to produce native builds for ubuntu, like Philip Johnsson has done in the past (extra : Philip Johnsson). The team curating the ubuntu distributions has unfortunately decided to stick to digikam 5.6 for their latest release (18.04), possibly because they didn’t have the resource to build the most recent version.
The AppImage of 5.9 doesn’t work properly on ubuntu. Exporting e.g. to Flickr is not possible, because the kipi plugins don’t work.
It is a pity to not be able to use the latest version after all the good effort that went into its development, just because nobody is building native packages for the major Linux distributions.
m+k
Well that’s not entirely true. I don’t know about the rpm side of linux, but on the debian/apt side of things Steve M. Robbins is doing a nice job of packaging digikam: digikam - Debian Package Tracker Packages aren’t usually out the moment the new release is there, but that’s the normal price for native and stable software. And Ubuntu is based on debian, so the new packages will enter Ubuntu eventually. I don’t know the release model of Ubuntu in detail, so that might take a while.
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Thanks for the link. Unfortunately, those debian packages cannot be installed on kubuntu 18.04, because of dependencies that cannot be resolved. Kubuntu would require a dedicated build.
So … users of Kubuntu 18.04 have three options:
- Compile from source – too complicated for the average or even experienced user.
- Use the AppImage which doesn’t provide the full functionality.
- Continue using the outdated version that the Kubuntu team have packaged.
m+k
It may be obvious for seasoned Linux experts, but I do not manage to install the deb packages from there, as the system cries all the time that dependencies cannot be met, no matter how many of the nested newer versions of the different packages I install.
Is there any easier way?
Ubuntu 18.04 here…
Thanks for answering!
the appimage is what I use, but its poor system integration (no export to file for instance) made me wish a true, normal package.
Now I have installed so many spurious packages that kdenlive won’t start/install, deep in my knees in trying to revert all those newer packages to the old status- not succeeding much yet :-/
I think KDE Neon has the latest digikam in their repos. Can you add the repo to your Ubuntu by chance?
I can’t say I have much experience but given that packaging, especially managing the dependencies, is a very involved procedure, I highly doubt it’s a good idea to randomly mix repos from different distributions. Even apt-pinning for different debian versions (i.e. same distribution) has potential for problems. If you want the newest and greatest software, you either need to pick a suitable distro (probably not ubuntu/debian lts/stable), use appimages or other kind of bundles or compile yourself.
Does anyone record step by step how to compile digikam including its dependencies on Debian/Ubuntu?
As I mentioned on the mailing list a few days ago, KDE has a nightly flatpak that could easily be adopted for stable.
I am wondering where the flatpak is. I was not able to find it.
The json manifest is here: https://github.com/KDE/flatpak-kde-applications/blob/master/org.kde.digikam.json – that one is for nightly builds.
Details on installing the flatpaks are here: Guidelines and HOWTOs/Flatpak - KDE Community Wiki
You’d have to take the nightly manifest and adapt it to the stable release, if you wanted the stable release.
I guess Ubuntu users can try this:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists kdeapps --from https://distribute.kde.org/kdeapps.flatpakrepo
flatpak install kdeapps org.kde.digikamI am going to try it on Debian myself
Keep in mind that is the nightly build!
Here is digikam 5.9.0 in KDE Neon .deb archive:
http://archive.neon.kde.org/user/lts/pool/main/d/digikam/
There is also digikam 5.9.0 in Debian Experimental repo. Debian also has exiv2 ver 0.26:
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=exiv2
I also saw digikam 5.9.0 in ubuntu cosmic archives which seems to be a copy of packages from debian experimental.
I would not want to activate these repositories in my system but one can download and install necessary .debs manually.