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The digiKam 8.0 open-source, cross-platform, and free professional photo management software is now available for download as a major update that brings numerous new features and improvements.
The biggest change in digiKam 8.0 is the fact that the software was ported to the latest Qt 6 open-source application framework for a more modern and future-proof experience. However, the app continues to be compatible with Qt 5 API.
Image support was greatly improved in this release by adding JPEG-XL, WebP, and AVIF export settings everywhere, the ability to convert to lossless JPEG-XL, WebP, and AVIF images while importing from your camera, JPEG-XL; WebP, and AVIF converters in the Batch Queue Manager, as well as support for JPEG-XL, HEIF, WebP, and AVIF formats as lossless images to store versioned images in the editor.
Moreover, digiKam 8.0 adds support for float16 (half float) images in the TIFF Loader and adds support for the libjasper 4.0 or later library in the bundles for JPEG-2000 support. Under the hood, digiKam 8.0 uses ExifTool 12.59, G’MIC-Qt 3.2.2, and Libraw 20230403.
Metadata support received a new option to write metadata to files and optional support for writing metadata operations to DNG and RAW files with the ExifTool backend, new options to save and load configuration profiles in the Advanced Metadata Settings panel, and an optimized layout of the Metadata Edit plugin for better usability.
The Advanced Rename feature now lets you search for items by the number of face regions or without face regions, support for increment file counter to sequence numbering with option [c] or [c,step], support for random text sequence numbering with option [r], as well as the ability to configure the first character for the unique modifier with {unique:n,c}.
digiKam 8.0 also updates the QueueManager with a new tool that lets you assign pick labels automatically by parsing image quality and two another tools that let you assign ratings, picks, titles, captions, and color labels in the batch.
On top of that, the new digiKam release adds support for cross-platform network paths in Collections, improves the usability by adding a new hamburger menu to the toolbar that will appear only when the main menu is hidden, and support for the SQLite WAL (Write-Ahead-Logging) mode to the image database.
Furthermore, digiKam 8.0 adds spell-checking support in the caption text widget, along with a new Spellcheck configuration panel in the Setup/Misc menu for digiKam and Showfoto, a new setting to list preferred alternative or translated languages in the text edit widget, as well as a new tool to perform OCR over scanned text.
Last but not least, this release adds online translations support to the Alternative Language text editor widget, along with a new Localize configuration panel in the Setup/Misc for digiKam and Showfoto, adds the ability to use Global or Customized Image Quality Sorting settings everywhere, adds Aesthetic Detection to classify images using deep learning model, and adds Icon-View settings to customize Labels visibility over thumbnails.
You can download digiKam 8.0 right now from the official website as a universal binary in the AppImage format that you can run on virtually any GNU/Linux distribution without installing anything or as a source tarball. Binaries are also provided for macOS and Windows systems.
Last updated 1 year ago
