News

Hotfix: KPhotoAlbum 5.6.112 Feb 2020

We just did a bugfix release for KPhotoAlbum 5.6. It fixes just one bug (#417360), but this one rendered the usage of tagged areas unusable: KPA crashed as soon as one tried to assign a tag to an area.

Big thanks to Johannes for fixing this in no time (and finding it before the distributors add version 5.6 ;-)

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.6 released08 Feb 2020

We're pleased to announce a new release of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management software!

This release particularly brings huge performance improvements when tagging a large number of images and performance improvements for thumbnail view. Kudos to Robert Krawitz for again diving into the code and finding places for optimization and removal of redundancy!

Additionally, this release adds support for KDE's purpose plugin framework.

Other changes (from the ChangeLog):

  • Change: Don't build with remote interface by default. The companion app has not been available for Android for a while now. This feature will either be removed in the future, or the Android app will be re-published.
  • Bugfix: Make theme files translatable (Fixes #406144).
  • Bugfix: Prevent invalid tag id in index.xml when renaming tags under some circumstances. When invalid ids already are present in an index.xml file, automatically repair if possible, or alert the user that manual repair is needed. (Fixes #415415)
  • Bugfix: Deeply nested tag groups are now displayed correctly in the tag groups settings page.
  • Feature: Show newly added tagged areas in the annotation dialog's fullscreen preview.
  • Feature: Add filter to thumbnail view, allowing filtering by token or rating.
  • Feature: Make it possible to hide the search bar and the filter toolbar.

Thanks to everybody who put work in this release. The git log lists the following individuals:

  • Yuri Chornoivan
  • David Faure
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Jesper K. Pedersen
  • Jonathan Riddell
  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.5 released and new project maintainer28 Apr 2019

We're pleased to announce the newest release of KPhotoAlbum, the photo management software for KDE/Linux.

This release is mostly about optimization and bugfixes. Most notably, we now support compilation with exiv2 0.27. Also, using mplayer for video thumbnail generation has now been removed, leaving the task for ffmpeg. Please also notice that, starting with this release, at least Qt 5.9 is required to build KPhotoAlbum.

Other changes from the ChangeLog:

  • Enhancement: Display dates when browsing categories. When browsing categories, two columns "Start Date" and "End Date" have been added. These columns correspond to the time range of the images tagged with that particular tag.
  • Enhancement: Faster display of browser overview page. Depending on the current context, the overview should now be displayed significantly faster (on my particular system the time to display the "Home" page dropped from 500ms to 25ms).
  • Change: More intuitive handling of down button in annotation dialog. Pressing the "down" button in a ListSelect in the annotation dialog now selects the first item, not the second one.
  • Change: Use non-linear scaling for DateBar by default. (Implements #356810)
  • Change: Instead of having "increase/decrease thumbnail storage size buttons", show a "Thumbnail settings" button in the status bar. (Fixes #357239)
  • Bugfix: Restore correct behaviour for "Statistics..." action. Thanks to Andreas Schleth for finding and fixing the issue!
  • Bugfix: Fix loading of user shortcuts for the annotation dialog.
  • Enhancement: Add "clear selection" menu item.
  • Bugfix: Fix zooming for raw images. Thanks to Angel Lopez for the bug report and help in finding the root cause!

Thanks to everybody who put work in this release. The git log lists the following individuals (with me being only responsible for the release this time ;-)

  • Robert Krawitz
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Alexander Potashev
  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl

New official project maintainer

Apart from this, we're very happy to now have a new official maintainer!

Jesper "blackie" Pedersen (the original project maintainer and founder of KimDaBa/KPhotoAlbum) announced his retirement from the project a long time ago, back in 2012.

Mostly, Johannes Zierl-Zarl lead the project commissarially since, at least from 2014 on when I joined it (and still, the fact that I even know a bit about C++/Qt coding and that I'm a KDE developer now are mostly caused by him being a forbearing, tireless and competent coach).
Now, quite some time later, he's officially the project leader. And fore sure, he's the one who knows his way around in more than 80,000 lines of KPA code.

So thanks once again to Jesper for founding this nice project and maintaining it for years! And big thanks to Johannes for accepting his inheritance and continuing to care about KPhotoAlbum!

— Tobias

Hotfix: KPhotoAlbum 5.4.2 released06 Feb 2019

Dear distributors, please replace KPhotoAlbum 5.4 with 5.4.2 and remove this version from your repositories as soon as possible!

We just released a bugfix version of KPhotoAlbum, version 5.4.2 (there's no version 5.4.1, I messed up the tarball, but it already was on the mirrors when I noticed, so I had to increase the version number another time ;-)

This version is essentially only about one bug, Bug #403668, which is fixed with version 5.4.2.

The default storage format has been changed from the "more readable" format to the "faster" one and is silently changed by version 5.4 when saving the first time. The bug lead to data loss if a category name contained non-ASCII characters: the respective category and all tags within were discarded. If you don't have category names with non-ASCII characters, you're safe.

If you already used version 5.4 and have category names with non-ASCII characters, please update to version 5.4.2, revert your XML database to a backed up one with the original data (luckily, KPA creates backups automatically in case you don't have an "own" backup) and run the new version. The database will be stored using the "fast" format, without losing anything.

Sorry for all inconvenience!

Apart from this, we also included the fix for Bug #403721. This one was "only" about a possible crash, which is also fixed with version 5.4.2.

All patches used in this version have been contributed by Johannes Zarl-Zierl, thanks for fixing this immediately!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.4 released14 Oct 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!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.3 released20 Jan 2018

We are pleased to announce the new release 5.3 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management software!

Removal of the face management

Most notably, we sadly had to remove face detection and face recognition (for now), as the Digikam guys apparently decided to abandon libkface, the backend we used for this. It can't be built anymore with a current OpenCV release, and has been thus dropped by most (all?) distributors.

We really hope to bring back this feature in the future! But at the moment, there's no library out there doing the job and we sadly can't write our own (yet – no just kidding. None of us can do such witchcraft ;-).

Other changes (from the ChangeLog)

  • Bugfix: Fix crash with prepared SQL queries on Qt 5.10.
  • Enhancement: Speed up startup by not counting images several times.
  • Enhancement: Improve robustness of video length detection and thumbnail extraction.
  • Enhancement: Made the full screen image preview in the annotation dialog reachable by a button.
  • Change: Display absolute numbers instead of percentage when loading new images.
  • Bugfix (#385551): Remove dead/unreachable code.
  • Enhancement: Speed up video thumbnail creation.
  • New: Added the "kpa-merge" script (by Robert Krawitz), which can merge two (version 7) databases and also remove unused labels.
  • Enhancement: Speed up removal of images from database.
  • Enhancement: Add a "Maximum megapixels" option to the search dialog.
  • Enhancement: Don't re-compute an MD5 sum we already have when adding new images.
  • Bugfix: Overall KF5 port regression fixes (missing buttons etc.).
  • Bugfix: Sometimes, areas weren't updated correctly when annotating images and changing between them.

Thanks to everybody involved

The git log shows contributions of the following persons:

  • Andreas Schleth
  • Ben Cooksley
  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Sylvain Stanchina
  • Tobias Leupold

Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release!

— Tobias