Anniversary release: KPhotoAlbum 5.12.0
November 27, 2023
We're happy to announce the new release 5.12.0 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management program!
20 years KPhotoAlbum
This is some kind of "special" release, as exactly 20 years ago, on 2003-11-27, version 1.0 was tagged (we tagged this release already on saturday, so that it will hit the mirrors and we can publish this release announcement at this very date though ;-).
20 years is quite a long time for such a "small" FLOSS project. Enough times, nice programs die from bit rot, because the only dev or too many of the few lose interest in it, don't need it anymore and/or nobody wants to take over maintainership. Happily, this is not the case for KPA! After all these years, the project is still alive and kicking, and – when the family, the job and everything else allow it (after all, we're all not fulltime KPA devs), we work on it to make it better.
Just speaking of me, I joined the project back in 2014, almost ten years ago now (which is arguably also quite a long period of time). And I'm really proud to still be a part of this great project :-)
So, I think it's time to especially thank Jesper Pedersen for initiating the project back then, and Johannes Zarl-Zierl for taking over the maintainership and being the project leader since 2019! Joyfully, Jesper never really stopped contributing to KPA and still works on it until now.
After all, we're still – without too much self-laudation – a small but excellent crew of FLOSS enthusiasts ;-)
But about the release itself:
What's new?
Bugfixes
Most notably, we could fix a really big amount of crashes and unexpected behavior. The following bug reports could be closed as "fixed": #472427, #472523, #473231, #473324, #473587, #473762, #474151, #474392, #475387, #475388, #475529, #475585, #476131, #476561, #476651, #476862 and #477195. That's quite an impressive list, isn't it?!
Kudos to our new super-diligent beta tester Victor Lobo for filing 17 of those bug reports alone, always providing meaningful information about how to reproduce the issue and tirelessly testing the fixes. Thank you! As a dev, you really appreciate this! Apart from that, also big thanks to Pierre Etchemaïté and Andreas Schleth for providing equivalently excellent bug reports!
Thanks to you all for helping making KPhotoAlbum better!
New features and changes
Apart from that, there are also some new interesting features:
- Support annotating images from the viewer by using letters to assign tags. Use the context menu and select "Annotate | Assign Tags" to enable. More information is available in the KPhotoAlbum handbook.
- Add option to sort category page by natural order (feature #475339). Natural sort order takes the locale into account and sorts numeric values properly (e.g. sort "9" before "10").
- Allow selecting a date range in the DateBar via keyboard (Use "Shift + Left|Right")
- Allow closing the annotation dialog's fullscreen preview using the Escape key.
… as well as sone changes:
- In the viewer window, using the letters A-Z to assign tokens now needs to be explicitly enabled. You can do this by opening the context menu and selecting "Annotate | Assign Tokens".
- When KPhotoAlbum is started in demo mode and a previously saved demo database exists, the old demo database is no longer overwritten.
- The ui.rc file (kphotoalbumui.rc) is now deployed as a Qt resource instead of an on-disk file.
- Improved usability of "Invoke external program" menu (#474819)
- No longer set the default shortcut for "Use current video frame in thumbnail view" to Ctrl+S and avoid shortcut conflict.
- Restrict context menu entries for fullscreen preview of annotation dialog to a sane set of actions.
- It is no longer possible to annotate images from the viewer by pressing "/" and typing tag names.
- It is no longer possible to change an image through the annotation dialog's fullscreen image preview.
Thanks to everybody involved!
According to git, the following individuals pushed commits:
- Yuri Chornoivan
- Friedrich W. H. Kossebau
- Nicholas Leggiero
- Tobias Leupold
- Alexander Lohnau
- Scarlett Moore
- Jesper K. Pedersen
- Johannes Zarl-Zierl
Thanks for spending your time with coding on KPA and for contributing your work!
Have a lot of fun with the new release, and keep KPA the best photo management program out there, also for the 20 years to come :-)