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The digiKam open-source and cross-platform professional photo management software has been updated to version 7.2, a major release that adds numerous new features and improvements.
digiKam 7.2 comes seven months after digiKam 7.1 and introduces lots of improvements to Albums management to better support wildcards and item grouping with special use cases, speed up user queries, improv removable media support, and better homogeneous in views about items properties.
Once again, the digiKam development team made a huge effort to further improve the face detection and recognition of the software, adding a new data model called Yolo to detect more faces on images with complex shot conditions, improve red eye detection, and simplify the use of face tags in the faces workflow.
Also improved in this release is the Batch Queue Manager, which improves the way removable items are renamed while processing, the Batch Rename tool for items in collections, as well as the overall stability and speed of the database for faster scan collection stages at startup and better KDE Plasma/Baloo support.
The search functionality has been improved as well to let you search for author or creator fields, caption, and empty title, and the advanced search now offers new options to search images in a specific month or the day of a month, independent of the year.
As with all new digiKam releases, support for camera models and formats is always up to date. digiKam 7.2 features support for lossy compressed CR3 and RAF files, uncompressed 16, 24 or 32-bit floating point DNG files, deflate compressed striped DNG files, as well as XMP and HEIF-preview extraction from CR3 files.
In addition, it now supports the following cameras and devices: FujiFilm X-S10, Hasselblad CFV II 50C, Leica M10-R, Q2 Monochrom, S3, and SL2-S, Canon EOS R5, EOS R6, EOS 850D, and EOS-1D X Mark III, Nikon Z 5, Z 6 II, and Z 7 II, Olympus E-M10 Mark IV, Zeiss ZX1, Sony A7C and A7S III, Panasonic DC-G100, G110, and DC-S5, as well as iPhone 12 Max and Max Pro.
Last but not least, digiKam now lets you save GPS information in the metadata of your image and offers better support for GPX files, offers improved metadata support, updates the Slideshow and Presentation plugins, and introduces CCache support in its code to make compilation faster.
Of course, there are numerous other smaller changes and countless bug fixes to make digiKam more stable and reliable when managing your photo collection. Check out the full release notes for more details.
digiKam 7.2 is available for download on Linux as an AppImage universal binary that you can run on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution. The AppImage binary now comes with a new tool that automatically checks and downloaded new releases, following stable or development workflows.
Last updated 3 years ago
