digiKam 7.0.0-beta3 is released

Software digiKam
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Dear digiKam fans and users, Just few words to inform the community that 7.0.0-beta3 is out and ready to test two month later the second beta release published in February. After a long test stage while this Covid-19 containment, this new version come with more than 670 bug-fixes since last stable release 6.4.0 and look very promising. Nothing is completed yet, as we plan one release candidate version before next summer, when we will publish officially the stable version.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.digikam.org/news/2020-04-26-7.0.0-beta3_release_announcement/
2 Likes
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Thank you for another wonderful release. I’m eager to test it!
Digikam is the best photo management tool on Linux (and not only).
THANKS THANKS THANKS!

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I think you meant “this summer,” or at least not “next spring.”

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Thank you Gilles and the team!
Keep being awesome and stay safe!
Cheers

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6 posts were split to a new topic: digiKam developers notifications from here

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Thank you, please keep up the great work!

I am wondering if you plan full support for HEIC/HEIF in version 7? Currently there seems to be support for thumbnail and image viewer, but no metadata. That includes rotation tags, so for many iPhone HEIF pictures will show up with the wrong orientation.

Exiv2 seem to have abandoned support for now due to potential IP issues (see their issue 318)

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I don’t think they will be able to do much if exiv2 does not support HEIC/HEIF. digiKam utilizes libheif as a workaround for now.

I am not 100% sure but let’s if exiftool supports this format potentially someone could write a plugin for digiKam to pull metadata from HEIF using exiftool.

I am guessing this is possible because digiKam introduced a new plugin interface a couple of months ago. I think all export tools e.g. Upload to Google Photos, etc. are plugins.

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yes, we have a lots of plugins now. You can find a list directly from source code sub directories here :

bqm : are all plugins for Batch Queue Manager
dimg : are all plugin image loaders (shared with showfoto)
editor : are all plugins for the image editor (shared with showfoto)
rawimport : are all plugins for image editor to process RAW files with external tools (shared with showfoto)
generic : are all other kind of tools to export and process images (shared with showfoto)

Note : there is not yet :

  • plugin for metadata backend. Only Exiv2 is used internally for image and ffmpeg for video. If a new one must be created in the future, it’s this one.
  • plugin for database backend. Only Sqlite, mariadb, or mysql are supported internally
  • plugin for face management.

VoilĂ 

Gilles Caulier

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Thanks Gilles.

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Looks like exiftool folks figured out how to read/write HEIF/HEIC metadata
https://exiftool.org/#supported
Maybe exiv2 or libheif devs could use what exiftool have done?

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I tried v. 7.0.0 beta 3 in macOS 10.12.6 Sierra. It doesn’t work. Is required 10.13.6 version?

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I don’t think a specific version of macOS is required. Maybe there are macOS folks who use digiKam here?

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macOS 10.12 is not even supported by apple, so no security patches. I’d strongly suggest upgrading.