14 DAY TRIAL // The development team behind the digiKam Software Collection project, an open-source initiative to offer a free, powerful and cross-platform image editor and organizer application, announced the release of digiKam 5.5.0.
It's been two months since the release of digiKam 5.4.0, and today's maintenance update comes with better threads management, which should improve the way digiKam uses your computer's resources, an enhanced similarity tool that better recognizes the similarity of external images that are being dropped in the fuzzy search and provides a configurable lower bound when searching for duplicates.
"Also, the results of duplicates searches can now be restricted to the ones that are in the same album as the reference image or in another album. This feature is also usable in maintenance tool. Again, the reference image is more clearly identified by the description reference image in the image information in duplicates view," reads today's announcement.
New garbage collection is available for digiKam databases
Another interesting feature implemented in the digiKam 5.5.0 release is a garbage collection functionality for digiKam databases, which makes it possible to identify various stale database objects, as well as to remove them. Furthermore, digiKam is now capable of shrinking database files, but only when their integrity is intact. The batch queue manager Watermark tool also received some attention in this new release.
For example, it lets you set the size of watermarks, customize the text font, adjust margin sizes, apply rotation manually, as well as respect the orientation of images. Other than that, it would appear that digiKam now includes a long-anticipated patch allowing the application to ignore certain directories during collection scanning, such as those from an NAS (Network-attached storage) device.
Work on the digiKam handbook continues, and Wolfgang Scheffner updated the Geolocation sections, GPS editor, and Map view contents to help newcomers discover the powerful features of the digiKam photo management application. Also improved in digiKam 5.5.0 is the Face Management feature, which is now capable of removing face tags from people sidebar while preserving them in the tags sidebar, as well as displaying recognized but unconfirmed faces in the recognized face tags and the special "Unconfirmed" tag.
Over 100 issues have been resolved during these past two months, and digiKam 5.5.0 ships with the latest libraw 0.18.2 library, adding support for some newer RAW formats, as well as fixes for Fujifilm and Sony camera decoding. A total of 931 RAW camera models are currently supported in digiKam 5.5.0, which you can download for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our website.
