Hotfix: KPhotoAlbum 6.0.1
January 06, 2025
This is an extremely important update to our recently released KF6/Qt6 port of KPhotoAlbum!
There’s a bug in version 6.0.0 which, under some circumstances, can lead to data loss! The problem is that, during porting, the algorithm we use to escape category names to be able to use them as XML attributes broke. And we didn’t notice. This can lead to data loss when opening a database and saving it using version 6.0.0, provided the following conditions are met:
- The “compressed” or “fast” XML format is used (“Choose speed over readability for the XML database file” is checked in the “Database Backend” settings)
- At least one category exists whose name contains characters other than “a-z”, “A-Z”, “0-9”, “:” or “_”
In this case, all tag associations for tags from the affected category can’t be mapped correctly and are discarded when reading the datase – and lost when saving it.
I personally found this after having tagged about 400 photos using my actual photo database and later on having wondered where my “Schlagwörter” tags for the other 15,000 have gone. Happily, we have that XML format. So, with an older backup (of course, I saved the database so often that the automated backups already exceeded the maximum number and the last unaffected database backup was already gone …) and some copying and pasting in KWrite, I could recover the old tags.
Anyway, This is actually the worst case. It can’t be recovered automatically. Big sorry to everybody affected! This should not have happened. And we sincerely hope such a bug doesn’t ever slip through our fingers ever again.
However, the 6.0.1 release fixes this. So: please update right now if you already used version 6.0.0! If not, skip 6.0.0 and go directly to 6.0.1! Dear distributors:
Please remove version 6.0.0 and replace it with 6.0.1!
Other fixes
Some other bugs have also been fixed in this release:
- Fix application icon on Wayland
- Fix crash when video thumbnail cache contains empty files (fixes Bug #497831)
- The "Configure KPhotoAlbum" menu entry is now shown again (not where it was before, but it’s there again – this alone would have justified a bugfix release ;-)
- Clicking on a tag in the Viewer’s info box shows the respective tag in the browser again
- When the main window is closed and the viewer is opened, it is also closed now automatically. This is what one would expect, and it also fixes crashing e.g. when the user clicks on an info box link with the main window already closed. Additionally, if the annotation dialog is open, we now also try to close it. If this doesn’t succeed (e.g. because there are pending changes and the user didn't agree to discard them) the close query is aborted.
Technically, this is not a pure bugfix release, because support for database file names other than index.xml has also been added (cf. Bug #418647). But this does not interfere with anything and does not change current behavior. So let’s also declare this as a bugfix, for “The XML database name is hard-coded and should not be” ;-)
Sorry again for all inconveniences version 6.0.0 may have caused. We sincerely hope that everybody affected by data loss can restore everything so that none of the hard work put into your photo databases is actually permanently lost.