News

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

KPhotoAlbum 4.6.1 released18 Mar 2015

We are happy to release KPhotoAlbum 4.6.1, a new version of a photo management and tagging application for KDE. Read on to learn about latest changes. This is a release dedicated to bug fixes.

Bug fixes

Below you can see a list of fixed bugs and enhancements:

  • UI: Moved the birth date dialog to the settings and added more functionality (typing the date directly, sorting by tag name or date).
  • Bugfix (#344462): Don't build thumbs when new image finder is cancelled.
  • Bugfix (#344419): When a new tag is added, select this very newly added tag, not the first tag that contains the new tag's name (which can as well be another one).
  • Improvement: better wording for DB upgrade messages.
  • Bugfix (#343822): Prevent KPA from crashing when a tag is dropped between two other tags and not onto one.
  • Bugfix (#342510): Fix crash with face recognition with some tag hierarchies.
  • Fix evaluation of GPS data for some cameras.

Thank you everyone involved

This time the list of contributors is surprisingly short. Thank you Tobias Leupold and Johannes Zarl for the work you put on this release.

— Miika

KPhotoAlbum 4.6 released02 Feb 2015

We are happy to release KPhotoAlbum 4.6, a new version of a photo management and tagging application for KDE. Read on to learn about latest changes.

Age view

One of the new features is Age View. This allows you to add the birth date of people on the pictures. Then you can see the age of the persons in the pictures at the time the photo was taken. A really cool feature especially when watching the toddlers grow. Take a look at a demo video to see what it is all about.

Face detection

Face detection and recognition has been requested for ages. And now it has finally landed in KPhotoAlbum. Now it should be even easier to tag the photos with the assistance of face recognition. Again this is demonstrated on a video, enjoy.

New features, bug fixes and other enhancements

Below you can see a list of other changes and bug fixes, which is far from complete.

  • Enhancement: Allow incremental building of thumbnail cache.
  • UI: Add slider for resizing the thumbnail grid.
  • Enhancement: Show a message if the untagged tag feature is misconfigured.
  • Bugfix(#322514): Allow resizing of thumbnail grid without rebuilding the thumbnail cache.
  • Bugfix(#334393): Handle image path correctly when importing from a .kim file.
  • New Feature: Display images on a map (available in the annotation dialog and in the image viewer)
  • Change: Rename old category names in the database. "Persons" becomes "People", "Locations" becomes "Places".
  • Change: new database file version is 6.
  • Enhancement: better performance on NFS (#340127).
  • Bugfix(#340963): better handling of the '&' character in folder names.
  • Enhancement: Improved category and tag groups (subcategories) pages in the settings dialog.
  • New Feature: Face detection and recognition using libkface.
  • Bugfix(#338870): Display a dialog if index.xml has a syntax error.
  • New Feature: Specify the birth date for people (or any other category item for that matter) in Maintanence->Edit Birth Dates, and see their age when viewing images.
  • New Feature: Add a context menu option to copy images from the thumbnail view.

Thank you to everyone involved.

Git log shows that the following individuals have contributed to the new version. Thank you everyone, and thank you everyone not on the list who have contributed in other ways like translations, documentation, testing and so forth!

  • Johannes Zarl
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Jesper K. Pedersen
  • Pino Toscano
  • Yuri Chornoivan
  • Miika Turkia

— Miika

KPhotoAlbum 4.5 released15 Jul 2014

Today we are happy to release KPhotoAlbum 4.5, a new version of a photo management and tagging application for KDE. Read on to learn about all of these changes - there are quite a few, after all it has been a year and a half since KPhotoAlbum 4.4 was released.

Android client of KPhotoAlbum

If you have an Android tablet (and a spouse or a kid that would like to see your images) then this is likely the most interesting change to you. If you don't have all of the above, then it likely doesn't mean much to you :-)

The Android client is available on google play. It requires KPhotoAlbum 4.5 as the client isn't a stand alone application, but rather a viewer for your existing database running on the desktop.

View the video on KPhotoAlbum on Android

Positional Tags

Another major feature in KPhotoAlbum 4.5 is positional tags. These allow you to tag individual sections of an image (say people).

View the video on positional tags in KPhotoAlbum 4.5

This feature was contributed by Tobias Leupold, welcome to the KPhotoAlbum team!

Improved saving speed

When I did a git log to see exactly what had changed since the latest release, I was surprised to see this on the list, as I was rather sure it already was in the previous release. I was wrong, so read this blog on speeding up saving to see what is in store for you.

Lots of other changes

Below you can see a list of other changes and bug fixes, which is far from complete.

  • New Feature: Added an Android client, which can display images from a running KPhotoAlbum on the desktop
  • New Feature: Tags can now be associated with an area of the image.
  • Enhancement: Backspace now shows the previous image in the Viewer
  • Enhancement: Implement file copy dialog in the Viewer.
  • Enhancement: Added option to ignore specific EXIF comments. (Some digital cameras set a non-configurable EXIF comment in each image. With this option you can specify which comments should be ignored.)
  • Bugfix (#254641): The current image is now highlighted when selecting images using the keyboard.
  • Enhancement: On first start, the image folder defined in KDE settings is used.
  • Bugfix: find thumbnail even for short videos (Thanks to Christoph Moseler for identifying the problem, and sending an initial patch)
  • Enhancement: Implemented the Page-Up and Page-Down key presses to select the previous and next image in the annotation dialog
  • Bugfix: Fix image import for kim files with external images.
  • Bugfix: Fix crash when reading .kim files.
  • Enhancement: Updated HTML darkJS theme
  • New Feature: Maintainance->sort all by date and time (With this command, you don't have to worry about stacks, locked images, or similar)
  • Bugfix: Prevent thumbnail progress bar from showing indefinitely when no MPlayer is installed.
  • Enhancement: Make thumbnail cache readable by all users. (This makes sharing a KPhotoAlbum database actually possible.)
  • Enhancement: Implement caching for thumbnail files.
  • Enhancement: Recalculate md5sum when image is changed by kipi-plugin.
  • Bugfix: Mark database dirty when images are deleted.
  • Enhancement: Run without video thumbnail/length support when mplayer is missing.
  • Bugfix: Don't try creating thumbnails for images not on disk.
  • Enhancement: Use cached QImage instead of invoking KIcon::pixmap on broken files
  • Enhancement: Add --info to script/kpa-backup.sh.

Thank you to everyone involved.

I wont even try to list what individuals contributed, but git log shows these names, so thanks for your contribution!:

  • Miika Turkia
  • Johannes Zarl
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Andreas Neustifter
  • Jan Kundrát
  • Pino Toscano
  • André Marcelo Alvarenga
  • Yuri Chornoivan
  • David Edmundson
  • Dominik Broj
  • Reimar Imhof
  • Jesper K. Pedersen

— Jesper.

Second preview of KPhotoAlbum 4.5 ready23 Jun 2014

We are now getting close to KPhotoAlbum 4.5. Today I just made a snapshot available, please test and give us feedback. Download the new version

This version also comes with a much improved android client available from google play.

The following is likely a non complete list of changes since KPhotoAlbum 4.4:

  • New Feature: Added an Android client, which can display images from a running KPhotoAlbum on the desktop
  • Bugfix: find thumbnail even for short videos (Thanks to Christoph Moseler for identifying the problem, and sending an initial patch)
  • Enhancement: Implemented the Page-Up and Page-Down keypresses to select the previous and next image in the annotation dialog
  • Bugfix: Fix image import for kim files with external images.
  • Bugfix: Fix crash when reading .kim files.
  • Enhancement: Updated HTML darkJS theme
  • New Feature: Maintainance->sort all by date and time (With this command, you don't have to worry about stacks, locked images, or similar)
  • Bugfix: Prevent thumbnail progress bar from showing idefinitely when no MPlayer is installed.
  • Enhancement: Make thumbnail cache readable by all users. (This makes sharing a kphotoalbum database actually possible.)
  • Enhancement: Implement caching for thumbnail files.
  • Enhancement: Recalculate md5sum when image is changed by kipi-plugin.
  • Bugfix: Mark database dirty when images are deleted.
  • Enhancement: Run without video thumbnail/length support when mplayer is missing.
  • Bugfix: Don't try creating thumbnails for images not on disk.
  • Enhancement: Use cached QImage instead of invoking KIcon::pixmap on broken files
  • Enhancement: Add --info to script/kpa-backup.sh.

To compile the desktop version, you need to ensure that the Qt4 version of QMake is found. For me it worked like this:

cmake . -DQT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/qmake-qt4 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/tmp/test
make
make install
/tmp/test/bin/kphotoalbum

— Jesper.

Preview of KPhotoAlbum for Andoid12 May 2014

Over the last few month, I've worked hard on a KPhotoAlbum version for Android. The way that it works is that the android application will connect to a running KPhotoAlbum instance on your desktop, to allow you to browse through your images as if you were sitting behind the desktop.

Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words, so a video must be worth a thousand pictures, so please check out this video on youtube which shows it all in action.

This is the first alpha version available, it has its glitches, but it works quite well nevertheless, so please do give it a try, and report back to me directly (blackie@kde.org) or to the KPhotoAlbum mailing list.

To use it, you need booth an Android version for your tablet or phone (KPhotoAlbum version 0.0.4 from google play), and you need to compile KPhotoAlbum yourself for the desktop (either from download.kde.org or from git where you need SHA 6897e0b from branch wpi/android)

To compile the desktop version, you need to ensure that the Qt4 version of QMake is found. For me it worked like this:

cmake . -DQT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/qmake-qt4 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/tmp/test
make
make install
/tmp/test/bin/kphotoalbum

— Jesper.