digiKam 8.5.0 runs on Apple Silicon and corrects many bugs

The developers of digiKam have released version 0.8.5 of the photo management software. This time, the programmers focused on bug fixes, language support and the creation of a version that runs natively on Apple Silicon.

In the release announcement last weekend, the project participants write that they have ironed out more than 160 bugs in the software. Internationalization, i.e. translation in the app, has also been updated. The online documentation is now also available in 16 languages, including Chinese, German, French, Italian, Japanese and others.

digiKam: Updated internals

The programmers have updated the internal RAW decoder Libraw to the status of the September 10 rolling release software (including bug fixes). ExifTool for managing metadata is included in all bundles in version 12.99. The Exiv2 library is included in version 0.28.3.

The project is proud of the native Apple Silicon package of digiKam. digiKam for Apple Silicon contains the Qt6 framework in version 6.7.2, KDE Framework 6.7.0 and FFmpeg 6.1 for video playback. According to the developers, the development of the native version was tough. They had to purchase new Apple devices and set up the environment for configuring, compiling and testing. However, this release marks the milestone for the complete Qt6 framework port for all platforms, for the Linux, macOS and Windows bundles. However, the previous macOS package for Intel Macs, which is based on the Qt5 framework, is also still supported.

The developers emphasize some bug fixes. For example, they have included the wrong ExifTool in some bundles, made usage improvements to the progress manager and improved ICC profile support and support for large TIFF files. Further enhancements relate to face management, which since version 8.0.0 of digiKam can classify photos using AI according to pre-trained aesthetic criteria. New deep learning models have found their way into digiKam and should make face recognition faster and more accurate.

Important entries can be highlighted in the overview using color coding. Previously, the function drew a bright frame around a thumbnail, which was perceived as very intrusive and has therefore now been replaced by a bar with a linear color gradient under the thumbnail.

Future plans

The plans for the digiKam version expected in February include further improvements to face management. The multi-threaded face pipeline is to be completely rewritten to improve performance and maintainability and to minimize false positives, for example. This is to be integrated into a new auto-tagging routine, which will bring the same enhancements to automatic tagging as to face management.

The new software version 0.8.5 can be downloaded from the digiKam project repository. It is available there as a source code tarball, 64-bit Linux AppImage bundle for glibc versions from 2.31, for 64-bit Windows 10 or higher and for macOS as a Silicon and Intel version.

Version 8.3.0 of digiKam from March was primarily concerned with the move to the Qt6 toolkit. Bug fixes were also on the list of changes there.

(dmk)