Hotfix: KPhotoAlbum 6.0.106 Jan 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.

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 6.0.0 released07 Dec 2024

This time, it’s a short one: We ported KPhotoAlbum to Qt6/KF6. That’s it ;-)

The port itself has been done by Johannes and me, additional commits have been contributed by Randall Rude and Fabian Würfl. Thanks for working on KPA with us!

One thing that’s worth mentioning is: For the map/geodata functionality, we need Marble. The Qt5/KF5 version of Marble can’t be co-installed with the Qt6/KF6 version, and this one is not released yet. But Marble 24.12.0 (which will be the first official Qt6/KF6 release) will be released in a few days. So just wait until it's out before upgrading to KPA 6, to not lose the map parts.

Maybe, the Qt6/KF6 version contains some regressions. The codebase is quite well advanced in years in some parts, and we had to mess with quite some legacy issues to make the whole thing fit for Qt6/KF6. So if you notice anything, please file a respective bug report and/or contact us via our mailing list or Matrix channel (cf. User support → Communication). Thanks for your participation (hopefully, it won’t be necessary too much).

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum 6 :-)

— Tobias

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