14 DAY TRIAL // We've been waiting for it for so long, but the wait is now finally over, as the digiKam development team just announced a few moments ago the release and general availability of digiKam 5.4.0.
A major release, digiKam 5.4.0 ships two months after the third point release in the digiKam 5 series, bringing a complete re-write of the video file support, as well as numerous other improvements across a multitude of components, and a nice collection of patches that should resolve many of those nasty issues you've been reporting lately.
Notable changes in digiKam 5.4.0 include performance improvements to the similarity search engine, better usability of the fuzzy sidebar functionality, which was contributed by Mario Frank, allowing the user to view more information and to display the precise similarity value to the original image or sketch, as column - an option that can be accessed from the "Item Properties" submenu of the column context menu.
Additionally, it looks like it's now possible to drag and drop a photo from the local file system into the Fuzzy search, as well as to specify a similarity interval in both the fuzzy and duplicates search functionalities instead of the minimum similarity in case you want to eliminate the images that contain a similarity above the maximum threshold.
The duplicates search feature was updated as well, offering an average similarity of the potentially duplicate images to the original in every result, allowing the user to sort them. "The individual elements of the duplicate search result can be sorted by similarity to the original image now, which also works in fuzzy search and sketch search," reads today's announcement.
digiKam is now fully ported to the QtAV framework
Moving away from the Qt5Multimedia component, starting with this release, digiKam is now fully ported to the QtAV framework, offering users dramatically improved, out-of-the-box audio and video file support. This implementation is based on the popular FFMpeg open-source multimedia backend and allows for a fast integration across all supported platforms, as well as features like video slideshow and video rotation in preview.
Among other noteworthy changes, we can mention that digiKam 5.4.0 updates most of the menu descriptions in the digiKam handbook, improves the grouping of images, adds support for processing only the current queue in the Batch Queue Manager component, enhances the tag hierarchies management, completion, and history, updates both the Google and Flickr export tools, and ships with the Exiv2 0.26 and libraw 0.18 libraries.
Over 200 issues have been addressed in digiKam 5.4.0, which you can now download from our website for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, where you'll find the source archive, as well as 64-bit and 32-bit AppImage bundles for Linux distros. The next major release will be digiKam 5.5.0, which is currently planned for a February 12 release. Don't forget to check out the screenshot gallery below to see the new features in action.
