14 DAY TRIAL // Famous digital photo management application for KDE and Linux digiKam, which includes an image editor for photo corrections and manipulation, has just reached version 4.0 Beta 4.
The digiKam collection of tools has received yet another major update, integrating a lot of features and fixes over the previous release. With the fourth Beta update released, the developers are getting a lot closer to the final version.
It also seems that this is the last Beta for the 4.0 branch of digiKam, but at least one more Release Candidate will be made available before the final version is published.
There are quite a few changes and improvements in digiKam 4.0 Beta 4 and the developers haven't pulled any punches. It's full of interesting features and changes, like the new tool for hierarchies tagging.
“A new tool dedicated to organize whole tag hierarchies. This new feature is relevant of GoSC-2013 project from Veaceslav Munteanu. This project includes also a back of Nepomuk support in digiKam broken since a while due to important KDE API changes. Veaceslav has also implemented multiple selection and multiple drag-n-drop capabilities on Tags Manager and Tags View from sidebars, and the support for writing face rectangles metadata in Windows Live Photo format,” reads the official announcement.
Also, a number of other major features has been added. For example, a new maintenance tool dedicated to parse image quality and auto-tags items automatically, by using the Pick Labels function, has been added. It's not sure whether this feature will make it into the stable release, but the community needs to test it and report back to the developers.
According to the changelog, the “Showfoto” thumbbar has been ported to Qt model/view. This means that later in the development cycle the full digiKam code will be ported to Qt5. This will not happen with the 4.0 branch, but the basis for this important move has been put in place.
The Import tool also received some attention from the developers, mostly because it was plagued by some nasty bugs. The import tool got its status indicator back, after it had been removed a while ago due to an issue that caused the application to crash.
The complete changelog for digiKam can be found on the official website. Download digiKam 4.0 Beta 4 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.