News

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

KPhotoAlbum 5.2 released03 Mar 2017

We are pleased to announce the new release 5.2 of KPhotoAlbum!

The most notable new feature is the new Geo Position selection page in the browser. Using it, one can add an area on a map as a criterion for the image selection. Thanks to Matthias Füssel for the original patch!

Other changes (from the ChangeLog):

  • Bugfix: Fixed disabled items in browser overview page.
  • Bugfix (#376635): Fix renaming and deletion of memberMap members.
  • Change: Maintained compatiblity with Qt < 5.6 (for now).
  • Bugfix: Fixed compilation with -fno-operator-names.
  • Bugfix: Added .kim import test case and fixed the import when using external images.
  • Enhancement: Improved the default layout for annotation dialog.
  • Bugfix (#374431): Prevent invalid characters in image description.
  • Bugfix: Fixed the path of kphotoalbumui.rc in kpa-backup.sh
  • Bugfix: Reviewed and fixed the install directories.
  • Bugfix: Fixed the date view on the birthdays page.
  • Bugfix: Fixed some issues in the thumbnail build progress counter.
  • Bugfix: Don't show empty descriptions in the InfoBox.
  • Bugfix: Fixed the search dialog.
  • Bugfix: Fixed the "remove tokens" dialog.

According to git log, the following persons contributed code:

  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl
  • Jonathan Riddell
  • Luigi Toscano
  • Raymond Wooninck
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Tobias Leupold

Thanks to everyone who put work in this release!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.1 released20 Dec 2016

We are very pleased to announce the new release KPhotoAlbum 5.1. The following things are new:

Changes on the face management

Using the face detection and face recognition ourselves, we sadly had to realize that the current state of the implementation is not really suitable for productive use. The detector finds some faces, but only the straight-up front ones, and some not. The recognizer recognizes some person, but in most of the cases, it's not correct.

In our defense, it's not our code that doesn't do the job really good, it Digikam's libkface that we use. What we wrote is just what's necessary to use it. We can't rant about libkface though, because we can't do it better.

However, there does not seem to be an Open Source face detection and face recognition library that works really good. So we reluctantly decided that, at this time, the whole face thing is simply not suited for public consumption, yet. We really hope that this will change in the future.

We did not remove the code, but we did "hide" it behind a cmake flag. The default build will not compile the face management code anymore. If you want it, you have to set the ENABLE_PLAYGROUND flag. So either, it's up to you to decide if you want it or not (if you use a distribution like Gentoo), or it's up to your distributor.

Better area tagging workflow

If we don't use face detection anymore at the moment, we should at least be able to tag areas manually in a fast and convenient way. We thus implemented a new feature: a small dialog popping up after an area is drawn. Using it, the tag to be associated to the area can be entered at once, without further clicks or mouse moves.

We think that this offers a nice and fast way to draw and tag areas, and we hope that you like it, too :-)

Other news

From the ChangeLog:

  • Enhancement (Bug# 370373): Made writing index.xml deterministic, so that diffing it produces minimal changes.
  • Bugfix: Fixed areas not drawn when a photo was viewed after a video in the Annotation Dialog.
  • Bugfix (#373263): KPA crashed when editing a birth date. Also restored the functionality if the whole birth date dialog, which was broken due to the KF5/Qt5 port.
  • Bugfix (#373128): Fixed the "Copy image(s) to..." and "Link image(s) to..." menu.
  • Bugfix: Prevent duplicate positionable tags. All except one are lost when saving. Apparently, nobody noticed this flaw since the introduction of positionable tags ;-)
  • Bugfix: Prevent the image preview from flickering in the Annotation Dialog.
  • Bugfix: Fixed various issues with the Android Remote Control.

Thanks to everybody involved

The git log says that the following individuals pushed code:

  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl
  • Luigi Toscano
  • Pino Toscano
  • Tobias Leupold

Thanks to everybody who worked on this release!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.0.1 released05 Nov 2016

We are very pleased to announce the new release KPhotoAlbum 5.0.1.

What's new

Version 5.0.1 builds against the new KDE Frameworks libraries and uses Qt5. It does not depend on kde4libssupport, so it's a "real" KF5 program. All depreceated code has be reworked to match the current recommendations.

It's feature-complete, meaning everything that our KDE4/Qt4 version could do has been ported and works (again).

It has been quite a long time since our last release, which also means that a lot of testing has been done. It should be safe to use KPA 5.0.1 (at least, it didn't eat my database ;-), but it should still be considered a bit beta-ish due to the lack of a large number of users having tested it out.

As always: if you find some bug or issue, please contact us.

5.0.1?!

The version number seems a bit odd (as we skipped 5.0.0). Here's why: at first, this was intended to be a beta release. We tagged one (5.0-beta1), but found severe bugs shortly after, so we decided to withdraw it. Later, we tagged another one (5.0-beta2), but our tag name didn't match the version names suggested by the KDE folks. So we tagged another one (5.0.0) just to find out the KF5 release scripts wouldn't work with our automatic versionning infrastructure anymore. So we had to tag another one, and thats is 5.0.1, because tags are permanent and the version number had to be increased each time ;-)

Thanks to everybody involved

The main (porting) work has been done (as usual) by Johannes Zarl-Zierl. But of course also many thanks to everybody else who has put work in this release and contributed code and/or bugreports! The git log prints out the following individuals who have pushed code:

  • Christoph Feck
  • Jonathan Riddell
  • Luigi Toscano
  • Matthias Füssel
  • Michael Palimaka
  • Miika Turkia
  • Pino Toscano
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Yuri Chornoivan

Have a lot of fun with our new KF5 KPA!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 4.7.2 released30 Jul 2016

We are pleased to announce the new release KPhotoAlbum 4.7.2 of the photo management and tagging application for KDE.

Version 4.7.2 will likely be the last release of the 4.x series, which depends on KDE 4 and Qt 4 libraries (of course if we don't find some severe problem). We will now mainly focus on the KDE Frameworks and Qt 5 port of KPhotoAlbum (of which the first beta release will be done soon, it already works quite fine!).

This release only contains bugfixes and usability improvements, no new features or big changes. So, everybody is encouraged to use the new version. From the ChangeLog:

  • Bugfix: Fix building without KIPI.
  • Bugfix: Annotation dialog: Fix up/down key if there's a single match for an entered string.
  • Enhancement: Tag names are now matched word by word against all parts of the search string (using the Search dialog).
  • Bugfix: Prevent duplication of special categories when updating to dbv7.
  • Bugfix: Don't exclude "Z" when filling the "Tokens" category for the first time.
  • Bugfix: Overall fixes of assertions.
  • Change: Dropped compatibility with libkipi < 2.0.

This time, Johannes Zarl-Zierl and Tobias Leupold contributed to the code, but also thanks to the users that reported bugs and/or proposed patches! Keep on doing so :-)

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 4.7.1 released26 Feb 2016

We are pleased to announce the release of KPhotoAlbum 4.7.1, a new version of the photo management and tagging application for KDE. This is mostly a bugfix release. Some regressions caused by the category localization removal did not catch our eye before the last release, but have been fixed now in 4.7.1. Everybody is encouraged to use this version instead of 4.7, as, most notably, parts of the category settings dialog – and thus a central functionality of KPA – were broken in 4.7.

The list of contributors is quite short this time, it's only Johannes Zarl-Zierl and Tobias Leupold, but also many thanks to the people that reported bugs!

Here's the ChangeLog:

  • Bugfix: Fix broken category settings dialog (categories can be added, renamed etc. again, was a regression of the category l10n removal).
  • Bugfix: Fix i18n problems with special categories.
  • Bugfix (#358971): Make import/export file filter translatable.
  • Bugfix: Fix overflow in viever cache size computation (Thanks to Robert Krawitz for pointing this out!).
  • Bugfix: Fix crash on i386 due to an uninitialized static variable (Thanks to Matthias Heukäufer for reporting the bug!).
  • Enhancement: Various improvements on the EXIF DB.

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum :-)

— Tobias