14 DAY TRIAL // The digiKam development team is pleased to announce the release of digiKam 5.6, a new stable update of the open-source and cross-platform professional photo management app for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms.
digiKam 5.6 is here about three and a half months after the previous release, which means that the development team had the time to implement all sort of new features and functionality to enhance the abilities of the image manipulator and organizer applications. Of course, as with any new version, there are various performance optimizations and bug fixes.
For starters, digiKam 5.6 comes with a new HTML Gallery tool that lets quickly generate a web gallery from a set of albums or a selection of photos, which they can immediately upload online and show them to their friends and family. Another new tool is Video Slideshow, which lets you create a video slide from a bunch of photos or albums.
"There are many themes to select and you can create your own as well. JavaScript support is also available," says the team about the new HTML Gallery tool. "The generated video file can be view in any media player, as phones, tablets, Blue Ray reader, etc. There are many settings to customize the format, the codec, the resolution, and the transition (as for ex the famous Kens-Burn effect)."
Extra sidecars support, items grouping improvements
Apart from the tool mentioned above, digiKam 5.6 comes with improvements for database integrity to also support MySQL databases, not only SQLite ones, new items grouping features like the ability to select which operations should be performed on all images in a group, as well as extra sidecars support, such as the ability to recognise additional sidecars.
Other than that, it looks like the geolocation bookmarks feature has been restored and the bookmarker tool fully re-written. digiKam is now capable of displaying the bookmark GPS information over a map. You can download digiKam 5.6.0 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from our website. The next update to the 5.x series is version 5.7.0, expected in September.
