KPhotoAlbum 5.13.0 released09 Oct 2024

After almost a year, we’re very pleased to announce a new release of KPhotoAlbum, the Linux/KDE photo management software!

There are two new features/changes:

• The “time ago”/birthday/age calculation has been reworked. Timespans should now be displayed in a nicer (more natural) way. Also, the age of people born on February 29 is now calculated correctly.
• The ‘--db’ command line argument now rejects any file name that is not either an existing directory or an index.xml file within an existing directory (cf. Bug #418647).

Apart from that, quite a number of bugs have been fixed (cf. the ChangeLog for more info): #477529, #477530, #477531, #477532, #478944, #479483, #481181, #483266, #444744 and #493849. And on top some bugs that weren’t reported as a bug in the first place :-)

One additional change that should be mostly interesting for the distributors is: The key used for signing the release has been updated. All PGP keys used to sign KDE software releases can be found in the sysadmin/release-keyring repo. My currently used key that I used to sign the tarball can also be found there, cf. tleupold@key2.asc.

… and what about Qt 6?!

Fear not! Of course, there will be a Qt6/KF6 release of KPhotoAlbum. We currently have a working Qt6/KF6 branch, so most of the porting is already done. Last thing that’s missing is a Qt6/KF6 release of Marble, which we use to display maps for geographic coordinates in photos (preferrably stored there using KGeoTag ;-). It seems like there will be such a release towards the end of the year. We will get KPhotoAlbum ready for Qt6/KF6 shortly afterwards. Stay tuned!

According to git log, the following individuals contributed commits since the last release:

• Boudhayan Bhattacharya
• Oliver Kellogg
• Tobias Leupold
• Randall Rude
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum 5.13.0 :-)

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum went to Akademy!09 Sep 2024

After years and years of working together on KPhotoAlbum, a considerable part of the devs team (Johannes and me ;-) finally met in-person, at Akademy in Würzburg!

It was a very nice and pleasurable meeting, with lots of information around KDE, e.g. community goals, where we stand with Qt 5 and 6 and where we want to go, programming, sustainability and so on. Thoroughly nice and friendly people (esp. the two of us of course ;-), with whom one could have nice and productive conversations. If you can, go to Akademy – it's worth it!

Also, we hopefully again could emphasize – in person – the importance a Qt6/KF6 port of Marble for KPhotoAlbum and also KGeoTag. We now actively work on porting KPA to Qt6/KF6, but we need Marble to be able to finally release it. But we're confident everything will work out.

Hopefully, this won't be the last time we meet!

— Tobias

Anniversary release: KPhotoAlbum 5.12.027 Nov 2023

We're happy to announce the new release 5.12.0 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management program!

20 years KPhotoAlbum

This is some kind of "special" release, as exactly 20 years ago, on 2003-11-27, version 1.0 was tagged (we tagged this release already on saturday, so that it will hit the mirrors and we can publish this release announcement at this very date though ;-).

20 years is quite a long time for such a "small" FLOSS project. Enough times, nice programs die from bit rot, because the only dev or too many of the few lose interest in it, don't need it anymore and/or nobody wants to take over maintainership. Happily, this is not the case for KPA! After all these years, the project is still alive and kicking, and – when the family, the job and everything else allow it (after all, we're all not fulltime KPA devs), we work on it to make it better.

Just speaking of me, I joined the project back in 2014, almost ten years ago now (which is arguably also quite a long period of time). And I'm really proud to still be a part of this great project :-)

So, I think it's time to especially thank Jesper Pedersen for initiating the project back then, and Johannes Zarl-Zierl for taking over the maintainership and being the project leader since 2019! Joyfully, Jesper never really stopped contributing to KPA and still works on it until now.

After all, we're still – without too much self-laudation – a small but excellent crew of FLOSS enthusiasts ;-)

But about the release itself:

What's new?

Bugfixes

Most notably, we could fix a really big amount of crashes and unexpected behavior. The following bug reports could be closed as "fixed": #472427, #472523, #473231, #473324, #473587, #473762, #474151, #474392, #475387, #475388, #475529, #475585, #476131, #476561, #476651, #476862 and #477195. That's quite an impressive list, isn't it?!

Kudos to our new super-diligent beta tester Victor Lobo for filing 17 of those bug reports alone, always providing meaningful information about how to reproduce the issue and tirelessly testing the fixes. Thank you! As a dev, you really appreciate this! Apart from that, also big thanks to Pierre Etchemaïté and Andreas Schleth for providing equivalently excellent bug reports!

Thanks to you all for helping making KPhotoAlbum better!

New features and changes

Apart from that, there are also some new interesting features:

• Support annotating images from the viewer by using letters to assign tags. Use the context menu and select "Annotate | Assign Tags" to enable. More information is available in the KPhotoAlbum handbook.
• Add option to sort category page by natural order (feature #475339). Natural sort order takes the locale into account and sorts numeric values properly (e.g. sort "9" before "10").
• Allow selecting a date range in the DateBar via keyboard (Use "Shift + Left|Right")
• Allow closing the annotation dialog's fullscreen preview using the Escape key.

… as well as sone changes:

• In the viewer window, using the letters A-Z to assign tokens now needs to be explicitly enabled. You can do this by opening the context menu and selecting "Annotate | Assign Tokens".
• When KPhotoAlbum is started in demo mode and a previously saved demo database exists, the old demo database is no longer overwritten.
• The ui.rc file (kphotoalbumui.rc) is now deployed as a Qt resource instead of an on-disk file.
• Improved usability of "Invoke external program" menu (#474819)
• No longer set the default shortcut for "Use current video frame in thumbnail view" to Ctrl+S and avoid shortcut conflict.
• Restrict context menu entries for fullscreen preview of annotation dialog to a sane set of actions.
• It is no longer possible to annotate images from the viewer by pressing "/" and typing tag names.
• It is no longer possible to change an image through the annotation dialog's fullscreen image preview.

Thanks to everybody involved!

According to git, the following individuals pushed commits:

• Yuri Chornoivan
• Friedrich W. H. Kossebau
• Nicholas Leggiero
• Tobias Leupold
• Alexander Lohnau
• Scarlett Moore
• Jesper K. Pedersen
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl

Thanks for spending your time with coding on KPA and for contributing your work!

Have a lot of fun with the new release, and keep KPA the best photo management program out there, also for the 20 years to come :-)

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.11.0 released12 Jul 2023

We're happy to announce the new release 5.11.0 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management program!

Most notably, this release can be built against Exiv2 0.28, which introduced some breaking changes. Older versions are still supported as before.

Other things that have been changed and fixed (as listed in the ChangeLog) are:

Changed

• Recalculate Checksums in the Maintenance menu and Refresh Selected Thumbnails in the thumbnail context menu have been unified to do exactly the same.
• Simplified logging categories: kphotoalbum.XMLDB was merged into kphotoalbum.DB

Fixed

• Fix issue where non-empty time units in the date bar were incorrectly greyed out (#467903)
• Fix bug with the date bar showing and selecting incorrect date ranges (#468045)
• Fix crash when the annotation dialog is opened from the viewer window and the viewer is closed before the annotation dialog (#470889)
• Fix inconsistent UI where menu actions would not immediately be updated to reflect a change (#472109, #472113)

The list of contributors is quite short this time, it was only Johannes and me ;-) Anyway, thanks to everybody working on KPA in any way, to everybody having contributed in the past and for all future work!

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum 5.11.0 :-)

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.10.0 released28 Mar 2023

We're happy to announce the new release 5.10.0 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management program!

The ChangeLog for this version is as follows:

Changed

• View-related actions formerly found in the "Settings" menu were moved to the "View" menu.
• Make options "Display Labels in Thumbnail View" and "Display Categories in Thumbnail View" reachable via the "View" menu and allow both actions to be assigned keyboard shortcuts (Implements: #145346).
• Store the untagged tag information inside the index.xml file instead of the Settings (Implements: #461206).
• Change scroll direction in the annotation dialog's date edit fields to match common (western) expectations and the date picker.
• Prevent scrolling past the occupied areas of the date bar.
• Files are now always created with group read/write permissions (Fixes: #438128).
• When exiting the demo mode, the demo database is now always saved if it isn't deleted.

Dependencies

• CMake: 3.18
• Qt5: 5.15
• KDE Frameworks: 5.78

Fixed

• Improve readability of "Show Tooltips in Thumbnails Window" tooltip.
• Fix image selection order for newly added images (Fixes: 442325).
• Improve date bar behavior when zooming the date bar and changing views (Fixes: 357237).

Removed

• Default shortcut for "View" images was removed.
  Pressing "Enter" to open the viewer is now the preferred way. To restore the old behavior, reassign the shortcut via "Settings | Configure Keyboard Shortcuts...".

Thanks to everybody having contributed to this release! The authors were (according to git log and in alphabetical order):

• Christophe Giboudeaux
• Tobias Leupold
• Luigi Toscano
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl

Have a lot of fun with the new version!

— Tobias

Hotfix: KPhotoAlbum 5.9.106 Sep 2022

Due to a problem with releaseme's tarme.rb script, the release tarball for KPhotoAlbum 5.9.0 didn't contain any translation data. Alas, I noticed this not before the tarball already spread the mirrors, so we had to withdraw it an create a new one, with a bumped version number.

So here we are, KPhotoAlbum 5.9.1 is out now – even with translations now ;-)

— Tobias