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digiKam 7.0 open-source professional photo management software arrives for Linux-based operating systems with major new features and dozens of improvements for all your image management needs.
digiKam 7.0 comes eight months after latest version 6.4, which probably many of you are currently using on your favorite GNU/Linux distributions, and about a year and a half after the digiKam 6.0 series. So, as you can imagine, it’s a massive update that adds numerous changes.
A lot of the work in digiKam 7.0 was done around the face recognition capabilities of the program, which now use modern neuronal networks and deep-learning technologies based on the latest Deep Neural Network features of the OpenCV library.
As a result, face recognition saw an increase of 17 percent, now giving 97% of good results, and it’s even able to recognize non-human faces, such as dose of animals, as well as blurred faces, covered faces, faces turned away, profiles of faces, printed faces, and even partial faces.
Moreover, the Faces Management functionality received a lot of improvements during this cycle. Among these, there’s the rejection of face suggestions, the ability to ignore faces, a new help box for Face Workflow, the ability to sort people names by importance, automatic assignment of face tag icons, sorting the Face View by unconfirmed faces, and grouping of faces by similarity.
Other new features included in digiKam 7.0 are a new tool called ImageMosaicWall that lets you create an image based on a bunch of other photos, new options that aid to write geolocation information into an image’s metadata, a new setting of the SlideShow tool that lets you play images in shuffle mode, as well as a new theme for the HTMLGallery plugin called Html5Responsive, which allows digiKam to generate a responsive photo gallery.
As expected, digiKam 7.0 also adds support for new RAW files and cameras. More than 40 new RAW formats are now support from recent camera models like Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II, G7 X Mark III, SX70 HS, EOS R, EOS RP, EOS 90D, EOS 250D, EOS M6 Mark II, EOS M50, and EOS M200, DJI Mavic Air and Osmo Action, FujiFilm GFX 100, X-A7, and X-Pro3, GoPro Fusion, HERO5, HERO6, and HERO7, Hasselblad L1D-20c and X1D II 50C.
Furthermore, the Leica D-LUX7, Q-P, Q2, V-LUX5, and C-Lux / CAM-DC25, Olympus TG-6 and E-M5 Mark III, Panasonic DC-FZ1000 II, DC-G90, DC-S1, DC-S1R, and DC-TZ95, PhaseOne IQ4 150MP, Ricoh GR III, Sony A7R IV, ILCE-6100, ILCE-6600, RX0 II, and RX100 VII, as well as Zenit M camera are now also supported.
Support for the HEIF image format was improved as well in this release with additional features, including support for Exif, Iptc, and Xmp metadata extraction using the libheif shared library.
Under the hood, digiKam 7.0 ships with full support for the Qt 5.15 framework and initial support for the upcoming Qt 6 major series, support for the latest KDE Frameworks 5.70.0 for all bundles, and official support for the Flatpak application bundle.
You can download digiKam 7.0 for GNU/Linux, macOS and Windows systems right now from the official website. Linux users will find there AppImages for 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, but you can also install digiKam as a Flatpak on your distro via Flathub.
Image: digiKam
Last updated 4 years ago
