KPhotoAlbum 4.7 released
January 19, 2016
We are pleased to announce the release of KPhotoAlbum 4.7, a new version of the photo management and tagging application for KDE.
This release contains a lot of new features, changes and bugfixes. Most notably:
Removal of translatable "standard categories"
KPhotoAlbum starts with a set of so-called "standard categories" ("People", "Places", "Events"). Those had two names: the English name, which was also stored to the database, and a display name, which could be another one if KPA was started with another locale than English.
This approch (which seemed to be a nice idea if e. g. the database was shared between people speaking different languages) led to several problems. We tried to fix them via the last releases, but after all, some of these problems could not be solved. So we decided to remove the dual handling of a storage and a display name. The displayed name is now stored as such in the database.
This probably leads to some non-English users seeing some of those categories with a different name when starting up KPA 4.7. Of course, the "new" names can simply be changed to their "old" translated version. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this was the only way to finally get rid of the category localization problems.
GPS search
It is now possible to search images by their GPS position. the search dialog now contains the same map as the annotation dialog, and a rectangle can be drawn on it, resulting in KPA searching for images within this rectangle (in addition to the other conditions).
Thanks to Reimar Imhof for writing the initial patch implementing this!
Browser category drag and drop support
Categories can now be organized via tag groups by dragging and dropping them using the browser, in addition to the tag groups settings page.
Other changes (from the ChangeLog)
- Bugfix: Various fixes of compilation failures on different distributions/gcc versions, as well as various fixes of crashes caused by regressions.
- Enhancement/UI: The category settings dialog doesn't tell the user anymore that he must save the database now after renaming categories. Instead, the saving is done automatically now, and category name changes can only be done on a "clean" (saved) database, so that no unwanted changes will be auto-saved.
- Enhancement: Better performance for single- and dual-core processors when creating thumbnails.
- Enhancement: Various enhancements for tne RAW support.
- Bugfix (#348096): Fix crash when accessing an image via KIPI plugins which has been deleted from the disc, but not yet from the collection.
- Bugfix: Don't crash if a category is renamed or deleted which holds the currently selected "untagged images" tag.
- Bugfix: If a category holding tag groups was renamed, the tag groups were lost.
- Enhancement: Added a "mark as untagged" action, as proposed by the patch of Reimar Imhof.
- Bugfix: Several fixes about the "untagged image" tag (counting, visibility etc.)
- Bugfix: Fix crash: Decrease the rowCount of the items list when an item is skipped due to a filter input so that KPA won't crash when an empty row is clicked (and the row count actually matches the number of displayed items).
- Enhancement: Add python script to show birthday info. Also Bugfixes.
- Enhancement: Enable exif search for lens data. Also various enhancements in the general handling of EXIF lens data (esp. better lens info for generic canon lenses).
- Enhancement: Display the image's aspect ratio in the ctrl-i image overlay.
- Bugfix: Ignore empty input while quick-tagging.
- Enhancement: Add "link images" to context menu.
- Bugfix: Fixed copy tags from last image (tags already associated with an area were added to the candidate list when they shouldn't be).
Thanks to everybody involved
According to git log, the following individuals contributed to this release (in alphabetical order):
- Andreas Neustifter
- David Faure
- Jesper K. Pedersen
- Johannes Zarl-Zierl
- Miika Turkia
- Pino Toscano
- Reimar Imhof
- Robert Krawitz
- Tobias Leupold
- Yuri Chornoivan
Thanks for putting your work in this release!