Digikam on Elementary OS

So, I’m playing around a bit with Elementary OS and decided to load Digikam. Firstly, that was WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more convoluted than it needed to be.

Just doing a sudo apt-get install Digikam installed v5.6. Whisky Tango Foxtrot? Then I tried the appimage version and that actually works okay, but is sub-optimal in interfacing with E-OS as it doesn’t appear anywhere in the menus.

Finally I did a flatpak install and that got everything installed in the menus, and it can be included on the dock and such, so all is well…

But, it doesn’t preview xcf files. The appimage version does.

How do I resolve this?

And why was this so difficult?

Elementary OS is still based on Ubuntu 18.04.

Open a bug against the flathub package, they need to include the library that supports xcf.

Because you should be using elementary’s Photos app.

Using the latest stable appimage from digikam.org is the best way of having an official stable properly built release.
The only way to have a fresh version of digikam on a ubuntu based distro I know of is installing KDE Neon.
Kubuntu with backports repo might have it as well but I am not 100% sure.

1 Like

Kubuntu 20.04 has digiKam 6.4, and following the experience with 19.10 it won’t be updated to 7 even with the backports PPA. The flatpak version runs well, although I can’t say if there is something missing from it.

Well this was merely an exercise. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Most likely won’t be using Digikam in anger, particularly on E-OS.

Not certain if all the convolution wasn’t an entry test to see if I was worthy. Don’t understand why this isn’t just a sudo apt-get install thingy, or hey install the latest version from the applications interface, but I definitely know enough about Linux in general to be dangerous.

I had the same issue with GIMP. It was a little easier to get the latest installed.

I think the problem is somehow related to exiv2 which digikam relies on. I think Ubuntu does not accept exiv2 0.26 and later versions due to some security holes or something of the sort making it hard building the latest version of digikam on that platform.

To be absolutely clear about this, the digikam developers have no
control over when a particular Linux distribution includes or updates
digikam (or any other program such as GIMP) in their distribution.

So please do not take your difficulty in getting the very latest version
of digikam working on an older version of a distribution to be in any
way a reflection of the dedication and hard work put in by the digikam
developers.

Linux distributions are a tested collection of programs and libraries
that should all work well together. Once you update a part of that
distribution you are departing from that tested collection. Different
Linux distributions have varying support for allowing this.

Andrew

2 Likes