News

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

KPhotoAlbum 4.7 released19 Jan 2016

We are pleased to announce the release of KPhotoAlbum 4.7, a new version of the photo management and tagging application for KDE.

This release contains a lot of new features, changes and bugfixes. Most notably:

Removal of translatable "standard categories"

KPhotoAlbum starts with a set of so-called "standard categories" ("People", "Places", "Events"). Those had two names: the English name, which was also stored to the database, and a display name, which could be another one if KPA was started with another locale than English.

This approch (which seemed to be a nice idea if e. g. the database was shared between people speaking different languages) led to several problems. We tried to fix them via the last releases, but after all, some of these problems could not be solved. So we decided to remove the dual handling of a storage and a display name. The displayed name is now stored as such in the database.

This probably leads to some non-English users seeing some of those categories with a different name when starting up KPA 4.7. Of course, the "new" names can simply be changed to their "old" translated version. Sorry for the inconvenience, but this was the only way to finally get rid of the category localization problems.

GPS search

It is now possible to search images by their GPS position. the search dialog now contains the same map as the annotation dialog, and a rectangle can be drawn on it, resulting in KPA searching for images within this rectangle (in addition to the other conditions).

Thanks to Reimar Imhof for writing the initial patch implementing this!

Browser category drag and drop support

Categories can now be organized via tag groups by dragging and dropping them using the browser, in addition to the tag groups settings page.

Other changes (from the ChangeLog)

  • Bugfix: Various fixes of compilation failures on different distributions/gcc versions, as well as various fixes of crashes caused by regressions.
  • Enhancement/UI: The category settings dialog doesn't tell the user anymore that he must save the database now after renaming categories. Instead, the saving is done automatically now, and category name changes can only be done on a "clean" (saved) database, so that no unwanted changes will be auto-saved.
  • Enhancement: Better performance for single- and dual-core processors when creating thumbnails.
  • Enhancement: Various enhancements for tne RAW support.
  • Bugfix (#348096): Fix crash when accessing an image via KIPI plugins which has been deleted from the disc, but not yet from the collection.
  • Bugfix: Don't crash if a category is renamed or deleted which holds the currently selected "untagged images" tag.
  • Bugfix: If a category holding tag groups was renamed, the tag groups were lost.
  • Enhancement: Added a "mark as untagged" action, as proposed by the patch of Reimar Imhof.
  • Bugfix: Several fixes about the "untagged image" tag (counting, visibility etc.)
  • Bugfix: Fix crash: Decrease the rowCount of the items list when an item is skipped due to a filter input so that KPA won't crash when an empty row is clicked (and the row count actually matches the number of displayed items).
  • Enhancement: Add python script to show birthday info. Also Bugfixes.
  • Enhancement: Enable exif search for lens data. Also various enhancements in the general handling of EXIF lens data (esp. better lens info for generic canon lenses).
  • Enhancement: Display the image's aspect ratio in the ctrl-i image overlay.
  • Bugfix: Ignore empty input while quick-tagging.
  • Enhancement: Add "link images" to context menu.
  • Bugfix: Fixed copy tags from last image (tags already associated with an area were added to the candidate list when they shouldn't be).

Thanks to everybody involved

According to git log, the following individuals contributed to this release (in alphabetical order):

  • Andreas Neustifter
  • David Faure
  • Jesper K. Pedersen
  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl
  • Miika Turkia
  • Pino Toscano
  • Reimar Imhof
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Yuri Chornoivan

Thanks for putting your work in this release!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 4.6.2 released19 May 2015

We are pleased to announce the release of KPhotoAlbum 4.6.2, a new version of the photo management and tagging application for KDE. This is mostly a bug fix release.

The main reason for this release is a changed procedure when the recently introduced database update is done (as said, it's an internal update which fixes some flaws with localized category names that have been around for ever, and it won't show up to the user at all). A backup of all probably changed files is created automatically so everybody could revert to the previous state (and an older Version of KPA) nevertheless, and the update is done automatically now.

Bug fixes and changes

  • Bugfix: Fixed several compilation issues for various distributions and/or gcc versions.
  • Bugfix: Fix month plural when formatting age.
  • UI: Show the number of trained faces on the Face management settings page.
  • Enhancement: Add AfterShot2 to open-raw.pl.
  • Change: Do the dbv6 update without asking the user. But create a backup of all (probably) changed files before. Hopefully, this will be more (end-)user friendly and everybody gets a backup for free :-)
  • Bugfix: Hide the "untagged image" tag also when typing in parts of it's name.

Thanks to everyone involved

According to git log, the following persons comitted changes (in alphabetical order):

  • Dominik Stadler
  • Miika Turkia
  • Rex Dieter
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Yuri Chornoivan

— Tobias