News

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

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.