digiKam 7.6 Released with New Masonry-Based Flow View Plugin, JPEG-XL Support

digiKam 7.6

digiKam 7.6 open-source, free, and cross-platform professional photo management software has been officially released bringing various improvements, code cleanup, and some new features.

Coming just one and a half months after version 7.5, digiKam 7.6 is here to introduce a new Flow View plugin based on Masonry layouts, a grid layout based on columns designed to optimize the use of space inside a canvas.

Users interested in using this third-party plugin can access it from the View menu in all digiKam main windows, as well as in the Showfoto image editor component. However, you should keep in mind that the plugin is not considered mature due to the fact that it can’t display any metadata or details from items.

“Without this type of layout, certain restrictions are required to maintain the structure of the layout, as with the main icon-view in digiKam album window. This kind of layout is used by the Pinterest social network for example,” said the devs.

digiKam 7.6 also introduces support for the JPEG-XL image format, as well as ICU (International Components for Unicode) support in the AppImage bundle, which is now based on Qt 5.15 LTS and KDE Frameworks 5.90, to properly handle all string encoding used all over the world, more specifically to support the use of non-latin1 characters in text search fields.

Qt 5.15 LTS adds several benefits to digiKam, such as support for the most recent versions of the MySQL and MariaDB database servers, as well as the Qt SQL plugin, in addition to important fixes.

Among other noteworthy changes, digiKam 7.6 improves geo-location support, RAW image import from darktable, adds non-intrusive feedback for users with long searches on the database, fixes deleting of items in the SQLite database, and updates the Libraw library component to the latest 2022-02-10 snapshot.

For more details on the changes included in this release, check out the release announcement page. Meanwhile, if you want to use digiKam 7.6 to organize and manage your photo collection, you can download the 64-bit AppImage bundle or the source tarball right now from the official website.

Last updated 2 years ago

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com