digiKam 7.9.0 is released

[system]

Mon Dec 5, 2022

digiKam 7.9.0 is released

by digiKam Team


Dear digiKam fans and users,

After four months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.9.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.

Bundles Internal Component Updates

As with the previous releases, we take care about upgrading the internal components from the Bundles. Microsoft Windows Installer, Apple macOs Package, and Linux AppImage binaries now hosts:

All of these components include important stability improvements and fixes.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now used to compile the AppImage for a better backward binary compatibility with the Linux distributions.


Maintenance and Improvements

This new version arrives with 97 triaged and closed files in bugzilla.

See below a list of major improvements included in this release:

• Fix of Google photo login and remote album management.
• Better management of faces location from metadata.
• Database schema migration backward compatibility.
• Better support of coordinates import from metadata.
• Better ISO date format support from metadata.
• Better performance with album management from a remote database.
• Fix application window positions under Microsoft Windows.
• Better Tags import and merge with items metadata.

The application internationalization has also been updated. digiKam and Showfoto are proposed with 57 different languages for the graphical interface. Go to Settings/Configure Languages dialog and change the localization as you want. Applications need to be restarted to apply changes. If you want to contribute to the internationalization of digiKam, please contact the translator teams, following the translation how-to. The statistics about translation states are available here.


Future Plans

We are close to releasing the first 8.0.0-beta1 in a few weeks before Christmas for a plan to target a final 8.0.0 in April 2023. We have already published an 8.0.0 alpha through a weekly release mechanism and receive good feedback from testers. During the 7 to 8 transition we will maintain a little bit of the 7.x series with a new 7.10.0 version if necessary, including the last most important bug-fixes discovered.

8.0.0 is ported to the new Qt6 framework and it is still compatible with Qt5. All new important features are hosted to this code. This summer we have mentored two students working on:

Both projects are now finalized and integrated to 8.0.0.

Final Words

Thanks to all users for your support and donations, and to all contributors, students, testers who allowed us to improve this release.

digiKam 7.9.0 source code tarball, Linux 64 bits AppImage bundles, macOS Intel package, and Windows 64 bits installers can be downloaded from this repository.

Rendez-vous in a few weeks for the first major digiKam 8.0.0-beta1 release.

Happy digiKaming.

---

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.digikam.org/news/2022-12-05-7.9.0_release_announcement/

[kha84]

Awesome news! Can’t wait for 8.0.0! Amazing job, guys

[dajomu (Dave)]

According to DK Splash screen, about 1300 bugs has been squashed … Since DK 6.xx.
Come on, that is just a silly comparison. I think it would be much more informative to show how many bugs has been fixed from one version to another.

[ashurbanipal (Steve)]

What splash screen? Mine doesn’t say anything about bugs. But no matter, there’s a link to the bugs fixed in this release in the announcement (first line under “Maintenance and Improvements”). That info has been in digiKam’s new release announcements for as long as I can remember.

[dajomu (Dave)]

you are correct. there are no splash screen, but if you click on root album DK shows a screen stating that 1300 bug corrected since 6.x.

[ashurbanipal (Steve)]

Ah, I see it now! I almost never use that screen, since I usually have an album selected & only see the thumbnails for the album. It does seem odd to go back to 6.x.x version, I wonder if the text just hasn’t been updated in the 7.x.x series?

[Emanuele_Colo]

I love digikam it is my main program on Ubuntu.
Thanks for all the job you are doing.

[Mano (ellermann)]

I can not open it with MacOs Mojave. Is there a solution? 7.8.0. works fine

[avmaksimov.bs (Андрей Максимов)]

Thank you for the wonderful program and this release. I want to say about my dream and suggestion to operate with face management like in Picasa. For example (as I understand):

1. group faces with a certain similarity (ex. 90% similarity) and approve or decline face recomendation for some photos at once;
2. also group unknow faces and ignored;
3. try to recognize again when I already matched person and don’t recommend one more time with the same person;
4. try to recognize faces in background after each changes when previous job is done;
5. it doesn’t exist in Picasa but it would be perfect if I can create folder or may be create named link between people. At least folder please.

I hope this is correct and you could understand me)).