digiKam 6.3.0 has been released



Here the release announcement:

Dear digiKam fans and users,

We received a lot of excellent user feedback after publishing the third digiKam 6 release in August 2019. We are now proud to briefly announce the new digiKam 6.3.0, a maintenance version which consolidates this feedback and acts as an important phase of this 3-year-old project.

New GMic-Qt plugin for Image Editor
Since digiKam 6.1.0, we open digiKam to external contributions with a collection of new plugin interfaces, named “Generic” for album items processing and export to web-services, “Editor” to extend Image Editor and Showfoto post processing, and “Bqm” to add new tools in Batch Queue Manager.

With this release, a first official external tool have been ported to digiKam plugin architecture: GMic-Qt. This tool based on GMic library, a processing engine known for its noise removal filters, came from an earlier project called GREYCstoration. G’MIC offers many built-in commands for image post-processing, including basic mathematical manipulations, look up tables, and filtering operations. More complex macros and pipelines built out of those commands are defined in its library files.

G’MIC comes with a Qt-based graphical interface named GMic-Qt, which may be already integrated as a Gimp or Krita plugin. It contains several hundred filters written in the G’MIC language, dynamically updated through an internet feed. The interface provides a preview and setting sliders for each filter.

G’MIC is one of the most popular Gimp plugins, which is now also available officially for digiKam and Showfoto. If you don’t know yet G’MIC, we recommend highly to take a look to this review published on a Pixls.us blog one year ago.

DPlugins Demo Project on GitHub
On GitHub, a new project have been started recently to host a collection of plugins dedicated to document and test the architecture. Source codes of few HelloWorld plugins are available to help future external contributors to write new tools for digiKam and Showfoto.

This project have been voluntary separated of digiKam, and still under development. It needs more time to write code in goal to use whole exported digiKam API with code examples.

Migration to Gitlab
Historically, digiKam has always used the KDE infrastructures to manage the project. We use Git repositories to host source code, Bugzilla to manage reports, Phabricator for pull-requests, and Jenkins for the continuous integration, deployment, and static analysis.

One year ago, KDE team start to search a collaboration with a major developpement Web service to increase the visibility and the accessibility for new contributors to the infrastructure hosting open-source projects. They select GitLab platform for technical reasons. A migration of KDE projects have been started quickly and digiKam have been one of the first to be ready for this kind of move. The KDE GitLab area have been named invent.kde.org.

So the new Gitlab integration with git repositories was completed in end of August and we have now 3 places to host source code:

digiKam C++ code.
digiKam documentation.
digiKam web site.
For the future, we will use step by step the GitLab platform tools.

Website Update
Following the gitlab migration of web-site repository, some important parts have been updated, especially the pages to introduce the application, to present the project overview, and list all main features in details.

Plenty of new screenshots have been added and also the list of features have been in-depth updated. This will help future new users to judge the application before to choice digiKam as main personnal photo manager.

The Final Words
Thanks to all users for your support, and to all contributors, students, and testers who allowed us to improve this release.

digiKam 6.3.0 source code tarball, Linux 32/64 bits AppImage bundles, MacOS package and Windows 32/64 bits installers can be downloaded from this repository.

Rendez-vous in few months for the next 6.4.0 release where we will give details on a project from a student working with us while this summer, about a new clone tool for Image Editor and Showfoto.

Happy digiKaming…

  digiKam 6.3.0 released