14 DAY TRIAL // In the last minutes of November 7, 2016, the development team behind the open-source and cross-platform digiKam image editor, viewer and organizer software was proud to announce the release of digiKam 5.3.0.
digiKam 5.3.0 is the third maintenance update to the stable 5.x series of the software project, bringing a month's worth of bug fixes and general improvements. However, the biggest new change in digiKam 5.3.0 is the availability of an AppImage bundle that allows Linux users to install the application in virtually any GNU/Linux distribution.
The AppImage bundle includes all the digiKam components, as well as its main third-party libraries, such as Lensfun, Exiv2, and OpenCV, which have been optimized for digiKam. To make sure that there won't be any issues with the AppImage bundle, the digiKam developers didn't include any additional or experimental configurations.
"AppImage use Fuse file-system, which is de-compressed into a temporary directory to start the application. You don't need to install digiKam on your system to be able to use it. Better, you can use the official digiKam from your Linux distribution in parallel, and test the new version without any conflict with one used in production," explain the devs.
Easy distribution of digiKam across multiple Linux OSes
Shipping an AppImage bundle is the smartest move for Open Source projects, and it makes installing digiKam a breeze on Linux-based operating systems that do not yet include the RAW image editor, viewer and organizer in their official repositories, at least not the latest version.
Best of all, the digiKam AppImage package is available for download for 64-bit and 32-bit distributions. To enjoy the new digiKam 5.3.0 release, all you have to do is save the AppImage for your hardware architecture in the Home folder, make it executable and run it. If you're curious what was changed in digiKam 5.3.0, study the Git changelog.
