digiKam 6.4.0 is released
Dear digiKam fans and users,
digiKam 6.4.0 is released
We received a lot of excellent user feedback after publishing the 4th digiKam 6 release in September 2019. We are now proud to briefly announce the new digiKam 6.4.0, a maintenance version which consolidates this feedback and acts as an important phase of this 3-year-old project.
The Plugins Interface “DPlugins” Extended Again
With 6.1.0, digiKam project has introduced the new DPlugins interface to customize and extend the application. This powerful interface, available in digiKam and Showfoto, already manage all Generic tools to import/export items or edit metadata, Image Editor re-touch tools (colors editing, Transforms, Decorate, Effects, etc.), Batch Queue Manager tools to process many files at once.
With 6.2.0 and 6.3.0, we increase the plugins list ready for production, to finaly provide more than 120 native tools. With this new release, 14 new plugins have been introduced again and available in digiKam and Showfoto…
Native Image Loader as Plugins
We extended the DPlugins interface to support all native image loader as plugins instead to use hard-coded loader.
This include these image format JPEG, PNG, TIFF, JPEG-2000, PGF. The RAW loader based on libraw have been also ported to this interface, as the ImageMagick and QImage codecs wrappers. For these 2 last one, digiKam is able to load and save plenty of exotic image formats, even if codecs are not native with digiKam API and do not supports HDR, color management, metadata, etc.
A new image format is now support as native: HEIF. This container is used by Apple to store photo in iOS devices. HIEF is a file format for individual images and image sequences. It was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). The MPEG group claims that twice as much information can be stored in a HEIF image as in a JPEG image of the same size, resulting in a better quality image. HEIF also supports animation, and is capable of storing more information than an animated GIF at a small fraction of the size.
Compression in HEIF is delegate to extra codec and currently x265 is supported. This codec give excelent results to encode images with small size without to lose information. Metadata, preview, and color management are also supported.
HEIF is able to support HDR, if extra codec is compiled with pixel color depth higher than 8 bits. In this case, digiKam will able to store and edit image without to lose quality, as we support HDR since a while.
With later release, we plan to support more native files format though this image loader plugin interface, as WebP, a new standard from Google to use on internet to replace JPEG, and JPEG-XR, a new Windwos format from Microsoft used under Windows for the photo archiving. Both formats use wavelets like compression mechanism and are avaialble as open-source components.
A new version of the open-source digital photo management application digiKam is available
