Dear digiKam fans and users,
Just in time to get you into the holiday spirit, we are now proud to release digiKam 7.0.0-beta1 today. This first version start the test stages for next 7.x series planing while next year. Have a look at some of the highlights listed below, to discover all those changes in detail.
Deep-Learning Powered Faces Management While many years, digiKam has provided an important feature dedicated to detect and recognized faces in photo.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.digikam.org/news/2019-12-22-7.0.0-beta1_release_announcement/
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Happy new year to you too! Thanks for your support in developping the best open source tool for managint the photos. I love digikam, to me is the best. Keep it up!
Wanted to add that there are newest builds (Jan 5 versus Dec 22) available here:
https://files.kde.org/digikam/
digiKam 7.0.0 is a work in progress but I find it stable.
The more all of us test the new face recognition system the better it will be in the actual release.
I’ll try 7.0… on windows 6.4 is not very stable for me… it gets stuck, and not updating when adding files or folders… I’m sure it may work better on linux. I’ll try to contribute submitting bugs. But I still haven’t figured out how to generate logs. Thank you!
You can install Microsoft DebugView and launch it aside digiKam.
digiKam will print output in Debug View.
digiKam also saves a crash log somewhere in your AppData directory.
thank you Andrius… I think it works well now. It was not crashing but the mouse cursor was turning to a spinning circle for 30 seconds or more sometimes… I have seen some errors in the DebugView about not being able to generate thumbnails for some .afphoto files… I added that extension in mime type preferences… to try to include those files too. I saw the thumbnail was not supported because it is a closed format, but I saw it listed as a generic icon so I thought it was ok to have them as a link to open with the application maybe… but after removing that extension in preferences… now digiKam seems to be working well so far.
Now I still want to try 7.0 beta, but I don’t want to affect the 6.4 installation or database(using Mariadb). I hope it can be installed in another folder without uninstalling 6.4 and maybe configure it with another database table. Or is it safe to upgrade and use the same database?
I would recommend backing up the database for sure.
I don’t do that myself but mostly because I rely on embedded metadata (in JPGs) and sidecar XMPs (for the rest).
I am not sure if it is possible to install a 2nd version of digiKam on Windows because the installer always asks to remove the previous version. However I am pretty sure that if you copy/rename the folder digiKam installed to it will work just fine.
I don’t know about installing a second version on windows, but having separate databases is easy: Copy the configuration file and change the database server path. And then put whichever config file you currently want to use to the right path (I use git with two branches for separate dbs).
Is it possible to group raws and corresponding jpegs (filename) in digiKam? It’s often useful to manage them as one image.
Sure: Group by filename in the context menu does that.
Yes. The option is only available in the context menu (right click) though. There is a section about grouping the top menu but you won’t find the group by filename option there.
Ah you have to select a bunch of images then group them? It shows up in the context menu when multiple images are selected. Looks like it’s what I was after but It was conceptually something completely different than how I though about it. That’s probably why I didn’t find it.
Yes you have to select multiple images, right click on them and then group. I was not able to find the option myself few years back.
At each close of digiKam on Windows it stays in memory 
It also runs dbus-daemon.exe which stays in memory (though only once). Here’s what my taskmanager shows after starting and closing digiKam 3 times.
Did any of you get to trying out the Facial Recognition feature ?
I can’t get Digikam to detect and recognize faces and show me with a green border line.
Give beta2 a try, there have been a few changes regarding face management: digiKam 7.0.0-beta2 is released
but that is only possible, if the filename is exactly the same (except the extension), right? That means you cannot group version files with the raw file, or is there any other approach to save the versions together automatically?