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digiKam 7.1 has been released as the first major update in the digiKam 7.x series of this open-source, cross-platform and free professional photo management software.
digiKam 7.1 arrives two months after the release of digiKam 7.0 with various new features and improvements. The most exciting one being better support for the metadata in the RAW files of the Canon CR3 camera.
While digiKam 7.0 offered basic support for Canon CR3 metadata, digiKam 7.1 displays more exif information, including colors profile, GPS data, and the standard IPTC and XMP containers.
The digiKam explains in the release notes that they put a lot of effort to provide users with richer metadata for CR3 files. However, they said that CR3 metadata changes are only supported through XMP sidecar and there’s no write support.
“Canon CR3 requires an intensive reverse-engineering that the digiKam team cannot always support well. This is why we use the powerful Libraw library to post-process the RAW files on the computer.”
digiKam 7.1 also introduces support for the Batch Queue Manager plugin to fix hot pixels in night images, or images taken with slow shutter speeds, using a black frame subtraction method, as well as to manage a collection of black frames from different camera models and to apply texture over images.
Moreover, the IPTC compatibility has been improved for UTF-8 character encoding to allow the use of extended characters everywhere in the legacy IPTC text container.
Of course, hundreds of pesky bugs were squashed to make digiKam more stable and reliable. You can download digiKam 7.1 as an AppImage for 64-bit or 32-bit systems right now from the official website.
The next version will be digiKam 7.2, which should hit the streets later this year with more improvements for the faces management feature introduced in the digiKam 7.0 release.
Image: digiKam
Last updated 4 years ago
