digiKam 7.8.0 is released

Dear digiKam fans and users, After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.8.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Qt 5.15 LTS used in AppImage bundle As with the previous release, we take care about upgrading the Qt framework with a LTS version. Since Qt 5.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.digikam.org/news/2022-09-03-7.8.0_release_announcement/
8 Likes

When can we see faces grouped by faces in face recognition? I mean after a scan all unknowns should be grouped by faces and not like now that every face is presented in one big unsorted pile.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444160

1 Like

Hi, The clustering face feature still under development in a separated branch. Code have been initiated while summer 2021 but student has not finalized the implementations. We will work on it while this autumn.

2 Likes

Agree. Picasa had this like back in 2015. If I want to manage photo collection mainly by faces, I don’t think I would bother using digiKam. I am surprised Face recognition feature isn’t being actively developed on.

Also the fuzzy search I’ve seen has stayed the same for years and no improvements there.
I have a huge collection of photos - 300,000 and I would greatly benefit from fuzzy search, but it doesn’t work properly most of the time.

Also similar image search searches images only by colors it seems and not by object placement/location and similarity of objects in image… I want to find sometimes images that are similar but not exactly the same (like on yandex.com image search), but I can’t do it with digikam.

And have the developers of digikam looked into AI image tagging? There are open source software out there on github that can tag images with keywords of the objects contained in the photo, like “one person”, “two persons”, “animal”, “landscape”, “water”, “sky”, “group of people”, etc.
This would be an extremely useful feature if added that could outcompete many other photo management softwares.

I think (not “know”!) the developers have looked into a lot of things. But they have only so much time to spend on digikam, besides other (arguably less important) activities like gaining enough to eat… So development may not go at the speed you’d prefer…

For your question about (semi-)automatic tagging, perhaps photoprism is of interest?

What? You should read the post above yours.

If you want object recognition now, check out

1 Like

Thank you for the share

Thanks to everyone who keeps this project going. I use dK in my every day work.

1 Like

Yeah, I tried it a few weeks ago, but I didn’t like that it’s web based and UI is also not very good (too large, too animated and slow, not compact) and meant for touch screens mostly. Image tagging was ok and it correctly classified images that I had trained before, but it’s overly time consuming and not automatic enough.

Also images are not linked to real locations on your file system, but they are stored in some other location upon import and you could download them and the file has modified filename and possibly different MD5 as well. Files also can’t be deleted from this software, only put in trash.

Later I found that Excire Foto had similar and even better tagging system that detects objects found in photos automatically and lets you later search it or checkmark various tags to get desired photos from a library. But it’s a paid software.

I tried it. Many of tags are very wrong but still, it could be very helpful to organize a large photo library.
I wish digikam had this type of tagging system implemented or added as a plugin and tags related to photo are stored in some centralized database.

Thank you very much for your continued work on digiKam! I really appreciate the work you put into making such great software available as Free Software!

1 Like

The 7.8.0 appimage does support heif EXCEPT that the imagemagick built into it seems not to support heif in that importing from a camera with heic files does not produce thumbnails, so no import can be done. This is in spite of the fact that my local imagemagick has been built to support heif, so the digikam appimage must not be using that. When will the appimage support importing heif from a camera???

digiKam does not use ImageMagick for HEIF files, we have our own HEIF image loader. How do you import the images from the camera? Via USB card reader or via MTP/PTP directly from the camera? If this is via MTP/PTP (GPhoto2 transfer), the camera must send a thumbnail.

This is via MTP/PTP from an Apple iphone 14 pro max…

For the love of god can you guys remove the annoying “download required files for face engine” popup? I don’t care about face engine, I don’t want the binaries, I just want to manage my reference library, I don’t have a checkbox to disable the message next startup, face engine scan is disabled in miscellaneous. It’s been 3 releases, common.

As always great work and thanks for doing it. Don’t know what I would do without DigiKam : )

The checkbox to deactivate the download prompt will only be available in digiKam-8.0.0.

Don’t know if digiKam cares about file extensions, but iPhones are known to use wrong ones occasionally (both .heic or .png when in fact, the data is JPEG…).