KPhotoAlbum 5.4 released
October 14, 2018
We are pleased to announce the new release 5.4 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management software!
Please consider that we dropped support for older Qt versions with this release. You will need at least Qt 5.8 to build KPA now.
Another notable change is that FreeBSD is now also a supported platform of KPA.
New developer
We're especially delighted to welcome a new KPA developer: Robert Krawitz. He supplied us with meaningful patches for quite some time now, and finally decided to really step in now. For v5.4, he contributed and changed a lot of code touching complicated parts of KPA, mostly, the changes were about optimizing code, speeding it up and removing unneeded or obsolete parts.
Kudos for this! We hope to have another long-term developer with Robert now. Welcome to the team :-)
A selection of improvements and speedups in version 5.4 follows:
- Insert Exif data for each loaded image as it's loaded, but within a transaction.
- Elide unnecessary MD5 computations.
- Reduce I/O wait time of image loader by introducing a scout thread.
- Improve I/O efficiency for MD5 calculation.
- Fetch Exif data only once during load.
- Improve efficiency of loading previews from RAW images.
- Ignore more sidecar files to improve performance (.xmp, .pp3, and .pto).
- Improve thumbnail generation speed and efficiency.
- Overlap thumbnail create with image load.
- Generate new thumbnails for moved images detected during load.
- Speedup startup 10-15% by eliding unnecessary category creation.
L10N rework
Big thanks also go to Antoni Bella Pérez, who put a lot of work on reworking the localizable stings in KPA, fixed a lot of errors, added contexts and made the whole thing follow KDE's I18N guidelines better.
Thanks to everybody involved
Here's an alphabetically sorted list of people who contributed to this release.
- Antoni Bella Pérez
- A. Wilcox
- Christophe Giboudeaux
- Johannes Zarl-Zierl
- Pino Toscano
- Robert Krawitz
- Tobias Leupold
- Yuri Chornoivan
Thanks for all the work!