Download digiKam 5.6

Version 5.6 of digiKam has been released. This photo management and image editing application for KDE has downloads for Linux, BSD, macOS and Windows. It includes support for various file formats and can also be provided with more options via plug-ins, such as exporting an album to Facebook or Flickr. More about the possibilities of this program is on this page to find. The release notes for this release are as follows:

HTML Gallery Tool
The HTML gallery is accessible through the tools menu in the main bar of both digiKam and showFoto. It allows you to create aa web gallery with a selection of photos or a set of albums, that you can open in any web browser. There are many themes to select and you can create your own as well. Javascript support is also available.

Video Slideshow Tool
The Video Slideshow is accessible also through the tools menu in the main bar of both digiKam and showFoto. It allows you to create a video slide with a selection of photos or albums. The generated video file can be view in any media player, as phones, tablets, Blue Ray reader, etc. There are many settings to customize the format, the codec, the resolution, and the transition (as for ex the famous Kens-Burn effect).

Database Integrity Tool
Already in 5.5.0 release, the tool dedicated to tests for database integrity and obsolete information have been improved. Besides obvious data safety improvements this can free up quite a lot of space in the digiKam databases. For technical reasons only SQLite database were shrunk to this smaller size in 5.5.0 release. Now this is also possible for MySQL databases with 5.6.0.

Item Grouping Features
Earlier changes to the grouping behavior proved that digiKam users have quite diverse workflows – so with the current change we try to represent that diversity.

Originally grouped items were basically hidden away. Due to requests to include grouped items in certain operations, this was changed entirely to include grouped items in (almost) all operations. Needless to say, this wasn’t such a good idea either. So now you can choose which operations should be performed on all images in a group or just the first one.

The corresponding settings live in the configuration wizard under Miscellaneous in the Grouping tab. By default all operations are set to Ask, which will open a dialog whenever you perform this operation and grouped items are involved.

Additional Sidecars Support
Another new capability is to recognize additional sidecars. Under the new Sidecars tab in the Metadata part of the configuration wizard you can specify any additional extension that you want digiKam to recognize as a sidecar. These files will neither be read from nor written to, but they will be moved/rename/deleted/… together with the item that they belong to.

Geolocation Bookmarks
Another important change done for this new version is to restore the geolocation bookmarks feature which did not work with bundle versions of digiKam (AppImage, MacOS, and Windows). The new bookmarker has been fully re-written and is still compatible with previous geolocation bookmarks settings. It is now able to display the bookmark GPS information over a map for a better usability while editing your collection.