14 DAY TRIAL // Digital photo management application for KDE and Linux digiKam has been upgraded to version 5.0 Beta 2 and is now ready for testing and download.
The digiKam developers have been working for quite some time on their new release, and it's finally coming together. It took them longer because they are porting it to Qt5 and KF5, and that is actually a lot of effort. They need to rewrite many parts of the application, and some of the APIs had to be changed or replaced entirely.
This has been going on for a while now, and since this is just a Beta, we can surmise that it will still take some time to finish. The good news is that porting process is almost over, and that releases should now arrive faster since the bulk of the hard work has already been done.
digiKam is no longer heavily dependent on KDE
One of the issues that users complained about in the past was the fact that the application was heavily dependent on a lot of KDE packages, making the installation of digiKam impractical on desktop environments other than KDE. Since this is now more geared towards Qt, it shouldn't be a problem any longer.
"The DNG convert tool has been migrated into digiKam Batch Queue Manager. This will simplify the user workflow when performing DNG conversions. Metadata Editor, Geolocator, and tool to import from the scanner are now available in the Image editor, Showfoto, and Light table," the developers explain on the official website.
Developers have also added the virtual digiKam trash folder, and synchronizing photo metadata with the database contents is now much faster. Moreover, users can tune the Exif/Iptc/Xmp tags to handle database population with key image information, the MySQL/MariaDB interface has been refined, and lots of other smaller changes and improvements have been made.
The complete changelog for digiKam can be found on the official website. You can download digiKam 5.0 Beta 2 right now, but please keep in mind that these are just the sources.