digiKam 7.3.0 is released
After four months of maintenance, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.3.0 of its open source digital photo manager.
Here is the list of most important features coming with this release:
ExifTool Support
The famous ExifTool is now supported officially in parallel than the former Exiv2 shared library to handle file metadata. ExifTool is a powerful tool that we will use in special cases to fix metadata dysfunctions that we cannot solve using Exiv2. An ExifTool metadata viewer have been appended to the metadata sidebar everywhere in digiKam. The view works exactly as the Exiv2 version, including the metadata entries filter. ExifTool supports a largest list of file formats than Exiv2.
DNG Converter Update
DNG Converter received a major update of the internal Adobe SDK for better support of modern original RAW files features and Digital Negative targets. This batch tool is also available on Showfoto with this version.
Better Support of FITS Astro-Photo and MPO Multi-Picture Formats
FITS and MPO, are now fully supported in the 7.3.0 release, including metadata. Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of data, formatted as multi-dimensional arrays, for example a 2D image, or tables. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy. JPEG Multi-Picture Format (MPO) is a JPEG-based format for storing multiple images in a single file. It contains two or more JPEG files concatenated together. Various devices use it to store 3D images, such as Fujifilm, Panasonic, and Sony. Thanks to ImageMagick codec and ExifTool parser working in the background.
New Tool to Export to iNaturalist
A new plugin was developed and tested to export photos to iNaturalist. This web-service is a social network of naturalists, citizen scientists, and biologists built on the concept of mapping and sharing observations of biodiversity across the globe. iNaturalist receive observations of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms worldwide, and around 130K users were currently active.
Slideshow and Presentation Tools Improvements
A long time feature was to allow users to send current items displayed to the trash during SlideShow. A student selected this year for the Google Summer of Code event has worked on this topic and extended this feature to the Presentation tool.
Find Duplicates Improvements
With the previous version, searching a big amount of pictures for duplicates takes a lot of time using one CPU core only. With this new release, all CPU cores are now used to speed the search in the database, and we introduce few usability improvements reported by end-users.
A new version of open source digital photo manager digiKam has been released.
