News

Hotfix: KPhotoAlbum 5.4.2 released06 Feb 2019

Dear distributors, please replace KPhotoAlbum 5.4 with 5.4.2 and remove this version from your repositories as soon as possible!

We just released a bugfix version of KPhotoAlbum, version 5.4.2 (there's no version 5.4.1, I messed up the tarball, but it already was on the mirrors when I noticed, so I had to increase the version number another time ;-)

This version is essentially only about one bug, Bug #403668, which is fixed with version 5.4.2.

The default storage format has been changed from the "more readable" format to the "faster" one and is silently changed by version 5.4 when saving the first time. The bug lead to data loss if a category name contained non-ASCII characters: the respective category and all tags within were discarded. If you don't have category names with non-ASCII characters, you're safe.

If you already used version 5.4 and have category names with non-ASCII characters, please update to version 5.4.2, revert your XML database to a backed up one with the original data (luckily, KPA creates backups automatically in case you don't have an "own" backup) and run the new version. The database will be stored using the "fast" format, without losing anything.

Sorry for all inconvenience!

Apart from this, we also included the fix for Bug #403721. This one was "only" about a possible crash, which is also fixed with version 5.4.2.

All patches used in this version have been contributed by Johannes Zarl-Zierl, thanks for fixing this immediately!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.4 released14 Oct 2018

We are pleased to announce the new release 5.4 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management software!

Please consider that we dropped support for older Qt versions with this release. You will need at least Qt 5.8 to build KPA now.

Another notable change is that FreeBSD is now also a supported platform of KPA.

New developer

We're especially delighted to welcome a new KPA developer: Robert Krawitz. He supplied us with meaningful patches for quite some time now, and finally decided to really step in now. For v5.4, he contributed and changed a lot of code touching complicated parts of KPA, mostly, the changes were about optimizing code, speeding it up and removing unneeded or obsolete parts.

Kudos for this! We hope to have another long-term developer with Robert now. Welcome to the team :-)

A selection of improvements and speedups in version 5.4 follows:

  • Insert Exif data for each loaded image as it's loaded, but within a transaction.
  • Elide unnecessary MD5 computations.
  • Reduce I/O wait time of image loader by introducing a scout thread.
  • Improve I/O efficiency for MD5 calculation.
  • Fetch Exif data only once during load.
  • Improve efficiency of loading previews from RAW images.
  • Ignore more sidecar files to improve performance (.xmp, .pp3, and .pto).
  • Improve thumbnail generation speed and efficiency.
  • Overlap thumbnail create with image load.
  • Generate new thumbnails for moved images detected during load.
  • Speedup startup 10-15% by eliding unnecessary category creation.

L10N rework

Big thanks also go to Antoni Bella Pérez, who put a lot of work on reworking the localizable stings in KPA, fixed a lot of errors, added contexts and made the whole thing follow KDE's I18N guidelines better.

Thanks to everybody involved

Here's an alphabetically sorted list of people who contributed to this release.

  • Antoni Bella Pérez
  • A. Wilcox
  • Christophe Giboudeaux
  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl
  • Pino Toscano
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Yuri Chornoivan

Thanks for all the work!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.3 released20 Jan 2018

We are pleased to announce the new release 5.3 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management software!

Removal of the face management

Most notably, we sadly had to remove face detection and face recognition (for now), as the Digikam guys apparently decided to abandon libkface, the backend we used for this. It can't be built anymore with a current OpenCV release, and has been thus dropped by most (all?) distributors.

We really hope to bring back this feature in the future! But at the moment, there's no library out there doing the job and we sadly can't write our own (yet – no just kidding. None of us can do such witchcraft ;-).

Other changes (from the ChangeLog)

  • Bugfix: Fix crash with prepared SQL queries on Qt 5.10.
  • Enhancement: Speed up startup by not counting images several times.
  • Enhancement: Improve robustness of video length detection and thumbnail extraction.
  • Enhancement: Made the full screen image preview in the annotation dialog reachable by a button.
  • Change: Display absolute numbers instead of percentage when loading new images.
  • Bugfix (#385551): Remove dead/unreachable code.
  • Enhancement: Speed up video thumbnail creation.
  • New: Added the "kpa-merge" script (by Robert Krawitz), which can merge two (version 7) databases and also remove unused labels.
  • Enhancement: Speed up removal of images from database.
  • Enhancement: Add a "Maximum megapixels" option to the search dialog.
  • Enhancement: Don't re-compute an MD5 sum we already have when adding new images.
  • Bugfix: Overall KF5 port regression fixes (missing buttons etc.).
  • Bugfix: Sometimes, areas weren't updated correctly when annotating images and changing between them.

Thanks to everybody involved

The git log shows contributions of the following persons:

  • Andreas Schleth
  • Ben Cooksley
  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Sylvain Stanchina
  • Tobias Leupold

Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.2 released03 Mar 2017

We are pleased to announce the new release 5.2 of KPhotoAlbum!

The most notable new feature is the new Geo Position selection page in the browser. Using it, one can add an area on a map as a criterion for the image selection. Thanks to Matthias Füssel for the original patch!

Other changes (from the ChangeLog):

  • Bugfix: Fixed disabled items in browser overview page.
  • Bugfix (#376635): Fix renaming and deletion of memberMap members.
  • Change: Maintained compatiblity with Qt < 5.6 (for now).
  • Bugfix: Fixed compilation with -fno-operator-names.
  • Bugfix: Added .kim import test case and fixed the import when using external images.
  • Enhancement: Improved the default layout for annotation dialog.
  • Bugfix (#374431): Prevent invalid characters in image description.
  • Bugfix: Fixed the path of kphotoalbumui.rc in kpa-backup.sh
  • Bugfix: Reviewed and fixed the install directories.
  • Bugfix: Fixed the date view on the birthdays page.
  • Bugfix: Fixed some issues in the thumbnail build progress counter.
  • Bugfix: Don't show empty descriptions in the InfoBox.
  • Bugfix: Fixed the search dialog.
  • Bugfix: Fixed the "remove tokens" dialog.

According to git log, the following persons contributed code:

  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl
  • Jonathan Riddell
  • Luigi Toscano
  • Raymond Wooninck
  • Robert Krawitz
  • Tobias Leupold

Thanks to everyone who put work in this release!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.1 released20 Dec 2016

We are very pleased to announce the new release KPhotoAlbum 5.1. The following things are new:

Changes on the face management

Using the face detection and face recognition ourselves, we sadly had to realize that the current state of the implementation is not really suitable for productive use. The detector finds some faces, but only the straight-up front ones, and some not. The recognizer recognizes some person, but in most of the cases, it's not correct.

In our defense, it's not our code that doesn't do the job really good, it Digikam's libkface that we use. What we wrote is just what's necessary to use it. We can't rant about libkface though, because we can't do it better.

However, there does not seem to be an Open Source face detection and face recognition library that works really good. So we reluctantly decided that, at this time, the whole face thing is simply not suited for public consumption, yet. We really hope that this will change in the future.

We did not remove the code, but we did "hide" it behind a cmake flag. The default build will not compile the face management code anymore. If you want it, you have to set the ENABLE_PLAYGROUND flag. So either, it's up to you to decide if you want it or not (if you use a distribution like Gentoo), or it's up to your distributor.

Better area tagging workflow

If we don't use face detection anymore at the moment, we should at least be able to tag areas manually in a fast and convenient way. We thus implemented a new feature: a small dialog popping up after an area is drawn. Using it, the tag to be associated to the area can be entered at once, without further clicks or mouse moves.

We think that this offers a nice and fast way to draw and tag areas, and we hope that you like it, too :-)

Other news

From the ChangeLog:

  • Enhancement (Bug# 370373): Made writing index.xml deterministic, so that diffing it produces minimal changes.
  • Bugfix: Fixed areas not drawn when a photo was viewed after a video in the Annotation Dialog.
  • Bugfix (#373263): KPA crashed when editing a birth date. Also restored the functionality if the whole birth date dialog, which was broken due to the KF5/Qt5 port.
  • Bugfix (#373128): Fixed the "Copy image(s) to..." and "Link image(s) to..." menu.
  • Bugfix: Prevent duplicate positionable tags. All except one are lost when saving. Apparently, nobody noticed this flaw since the introduction of positionable tags ;-)
  • Bugfix: Prevent the image preview from flickering in the Annotation Dialog.
  • Bugfix: Fixed various issues with the Android Remote Control.

Thanks to everybody involved

The git log says that the following individuals pushed code:

  • Johannes Zarl-Zierl
  • Luigi Toscano
  • Pino Toscano
  • Tobias Leupold

Thanks to everybody who worked on this release!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.0.1 released05 Nov 2016

We are very pleased to announce the new release KPhotoAlbum 5.0.1.

What's new

Version 5.0.1 builds against the new KDE Frameworks libraries and uses Qt5. It does not depend on kde4libssupport, so it's a "real" KF5 program. All depreceated code has be reworked to match the current recommendations.

It's feature-complete, meaning everything that our KDE4/Qt4 version could do has been ported and works (again).

It has been quite a long time since our last release, which also means that a lot of testing has been done. It should be safe to use KPA 5.0.1 (at least, it didn't eat my database ;-), but it should still be considered a bit beta-ish due to the lack of a large number of users having tested it out.

As always: if you find some bug or issue, please contact us.

5.0.1?!

The version number seems a bit odd (as we skipped 5.0.0). Here's why: at first, this was intended to be a beta release. We tagged one (5.0-beta1), but found severe bugs shortly after, so we decided to withdraw it. Later, we tagged another one (5.0-beta2), but our tag name didn't match the version names suggested by the KDE folks. So we tagged another one (5.0.0) just to find out the KF5 release scripts wouldn't work with our automatic versionning infrastructure anymore. So we had to tag another one, and thats is 5.0.1, because tags are permanent and the version number had to be increased each time ;-)

Thanks to everybody involved

The main (porting) work has been done (as usual) by Johannes Zarl-Zierl. But of course also many thanks to everybody else who has put work in this release and contributed code and/or bugreports! The git log prints out the following individuals who have pushed code:

  • Christoph Feck
  • Jonathan Riddell
  • Luigi Toscano
  • Matthias Füssel
  • Michael Palimaka
  • Miika Turkia
  • Pino Toscano
  • Tobias Leupold
  • Yuri Chornoivan

Have a lot of fun with our new KF5 KPA!

— Tobias