KPhotoAlbum 6.2.0 released13 Mar 2026

I’m happy to announce the new release of KPhotoAlbum, the photo management software for KDE/Linux – version 6.2.0!

Also, I’d like to introduce our new contributor Randall Rude (a.k.a. rsquared), who already worked quite hard on improving our beloved project – welcome to the team :-)

The following changes have been documented in the ChangeLog:

Added

• Display number of images on collapsed stacks (#223213)
• Add commandline option --find-new-files as a synonym for --search. In the future, --search may become deprecated at some point.
• Add support for QtMultimedia video backend
• Make default annotation mode in viewer configurable (#474317)
• Improved diagnostic messages for JPEG decoding errors
• Improved diagnostic messages for invalid file names in database

Changed

• Thumbnail cache and video thumbnail cache directories are now always ignored while searching for new images.
• Do not automatically select an image cluster on the map when moving the map if the mouse action started on an image cluster.

Fixed

• Allow large images up to an in-memory size of 2GB (#500200)
• Make "Clear form" button in search dialog actually clear all form fields.
• Allow setting keyboard shortcuts for "Clear Form" and "Options..." items in Annotation/Search dialog (#306044)
• Fix detection of KDcraw during build time
• Fix appearance of mouse cursor in the map view (i.e. indicate clickable items on the map)
• Fix display of EXIF date/time data (#511546)
• Fix several warnings in the console output (#505015)
• Use embedded 'creation_time' data in video files instead of file creation time (#472520)
• Allow saving the Annotation Dialog's layout either globally (as a template for all databases) or per-database (#513933)
• Prevent unnecessary entries in the block list (#512207)
• Prevent creation of .kim files over 4GB (mitigates bug #512199)
• Fix compilation without Marble
• Improved formatting of "time ago" texts

According to git log, the following individuals contributed code (in alphabetical order):

• Johnny Jazeix
• Tobias Leupold
• Randall Rude
• Andreas Sturmlechner
• Friedrich W. H. Kossebau
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl
• Justin Zobel

Thanks to everybody for putting work in this release!

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 6.1.0 released04 Oct 2025

I’m delighted to announce the new 6.1.0 release of KPhotoAlbum, the photo management software for KDE/Linux!

This is the first new release of our new KF6/Qt6 port, and it brings some fine-tuning, but we could also bring forward the code apart from bugfixes. here's the ChangeLog:

Added

• Add command line option --config
• Add command line option --save-and-quit
• Add home and end key shortcuts to date bar
• Add option to append description text when changing multiple image descriptions (#470433)
• Show visual feedback when setting a rating in the viewer (#509964)

Changed

• index.xml file format version bumped to “11”: The new file format version improves the “compressed” file format and handles arbitrary category names correctly. Positionable tags are also now stored natively in the “compressed” file format with far less overhead.
• Disable “View” actions when not appropriate (#505185)

Fixed

• Fix purpose plugin support (#501885)
• Fix database corruption when using category names starting with numbers (#477533)
• Improve responsiveness of date bar
• Fix spurious entries in “Search for images and videos with incomplete dates” (#505023)
• Fix crash when interacting with a category after deleting it (#478015)

Thanks everbody!

According to git log, the following individuals contributed commits to the new version (in alphabetical order):

• Albert Astals Cid
• Yuri Chornoivan
• Carlos De Maine
• Nicolas Fella
• Balló György
• Willem Hobers
• Tobias Leupold
• Randall Rude
• Yaron Shahrabani
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl
• Justin Zobel

Thank you very much for putting your time and energy in our beloved project :-)

— Tobias

Hotfix: KPhotoAlbum 6.0.106 Jan 2025

This is an extremely important update to our recently released KF6/Qt6 port of KPhotoAlbum!

There’s a bug in version 6.0.0 which, under some circumstances, can lead to data loss! The problem is that, during porting, the algorithm we use to escape category names to be able to use them as XML attributes broke. And we didn’t notice. This can lead to data loss when opening a database and saving it using version 6.0.0, provided the following conditions are met:

• The “compressed” or “fast” XML format is used (“Choose speed over readability for the XML database file” is checked in the “Database Backend” settings)
• At least one category exists whose name contains characters other than “a-z”, “A-Z”, “0-9”, “:” or “_”

In this case, all tag associations for tags from the affected category can’t be mapped correctly and are discarded when reading the datase – and lost when saving it.

I personally found this after having tagged about 400 photos using my actual photo database and later on having wondered where my “Schlagwörter” tags for the other 15,000 have gone. Happily, we have that XML format. So, with an older backup (of course, I saved the database so often that the automated backups already exceeded the maximum number and the last unaffected database backup was already gone …) and some copying and pasting in KWrite, I could recover the old tags.

Anyway, This is actually the worst case. It can’t be recovered automatically. Big sorry to everybody affected! This should not have happened. And we sincerely hope such a bug doesn’t ever slip through our fingers ever again.

However, the 6.0.1 release fixes this. So: please update right now if you already used version 6.0.0! If not, skip 6.0.0 and go directly to 6.0.1! Dear distributors:

Please remove version 6.0.0 and replace it with 6.0.1!

Other fixes

Some other bugs have also been fixed in this release:

• Fix application icon on Wayland
• Fix crash when video thumbnail cache contains empty files (fixes Bug #497831)
• The "Configure KPhotoAlbum" menu entry is now shown again (not where it was before, but it’s there again – this alone would have justified a bugfix release ;-)
• Clicking on a tag in the Viewer’s info box shows the respective tag in the browser again
• When the main window is closed and the viewer is opened, it is also closed now automatically. This is what one would expect, and it also fixes crashing e.g. when the user clicks on an info box link with the main window already closed. Additionally, if the annotation dialog is open, we now also try to close it. If this doesn’t succeed (e.g. because there are pending changes and the user didn't agree to discard them) the close query is aborted.

Technically, this is not a pure bugfix release, because support for database file names other than index.xml has also been added (cf. Bug #418647). But this does not interfere with anything and does not change current behavior. So let’s also declare this as a bugfix, for “The XML database name is hard-coded and should not be” ;-)

Sorry again for all inconveniences version 6.0.0 may have caused. We sincerely hope that everybody affected by data loss can restore everything so that none of the hard work put into your photo databases is actually permanently lost.

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 6.0.0 released07 Dec 2024

This time, it’s a short one: We ported KPhotoAlbum to Qt6/KF6. That’s it ;-)

The port itself has been done by Johannes and me, additional commits have been contributed by Randall Rude and Fabian Würfl. Thanks for working on KPA with us!

One thing that’s worth mentioning is: For the map/geodata functionality, we need Marble. The Qt5/KF5 version of Marble can’t be co-installed with the Qt6/KF6 version, and this one is not released yet. But Marble 24.12.0 (which will be the first official Qt6/KF6 release) will be released in a few days. So just wait until it's out before upgrading to KPA 6, to not lose the map parts.

Maybe, the Qt6/KF6 version contains some regressions. The codebase is quite well advanced in years in some parts, and we had to mess with quite some legacy issues to make the whole thing fit for Qt6/KF6. So if you notice anything, please file a respective bug report and/or contact us via our mailing list or Matrix channel (cf. User support → Communication). Thanks for your participation (hopefully, it won’t be necessary too much).

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum 6 :-)

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum 5.13.0 released09 Oct 2024

After almost a year, we’re very pleased to announce a new release of KPhotoAlbum, the Linux/KDE photo management software!

There are two new features/changes:

• The “time ago”/birthday/age calculation has been reworked. Timespans should now be displayed in a nicer (more natural) way. Also, the age of people born on February 29 is now calculated correctly.
• The ‘--db’ command line argument now rejects any file name that is not either an existing directory or an index.xml file within an existing directory (cf. Bug #418647).

Apart from that, quite a number of bugs have been fixed (cf. the ChangeLog for more info): #477529, #477530, #477531, #477532, #478944, #479483, #481181, #483266, #444744 and #493849. And on top some bugs that weren’t reported as a bug in the first place :-)

One additional change that should be mostly interesting for the distributors is: The key used for signing the release has been updated. All PGP keys used to sign KDE software releases can be found in the sysadmin/release-keyring repo. My currently used key that I used to sign the tarball can also be found there, cf. tleupold@key2.asc.

… and what about Qt 6?!

Fear not! Of course, there will be a Qt6/KF6 release of KPhotoAlbum. We currently have a working Qt6/KF6 branch, so most of the porting is already done. Last thing that’s missing is a Qt6/KF6 release of Marble, which we use to display maps for geographic coordinates in photos (preferrably stored there using KGeoTag ;-). It seems like there will be such a release towards the end of the year. We will get KPhotoAlbum ready for Qt6/KF6 shortly afterwards. Stay tuned!

According to git log, the following individuals contributed commits since the last release:

• Boudhayan Bhattacharya
• Oliver Kellogg
• Tobias Leupold
• Randall Rude
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl

Have a lot of fun with KPhotoAlbum 5.13.0 :-)

— Tobias

KPhotoAlbum went to Akademy!09 Sep 2024

After years and years of working together on KPhotoAlbum, a considerable part of the devs team (Johannes and me ;-) finally met in-person, at Akademy in Würzburg!

It was a very nice and pleasurable meeting, with lots of information around KDE, e.g. community goals, where we stand with Qt 5 and 6 and where we want to go, programming, sustainability and so on. Thoroughly nice and friendly people (esp. the two of us of course ;-), with whom one could have nice and productive conversations. If you can, go to Akademy – it's worth it!

Also, we hopefully again could emphasize – in person – the importance a Qt6/KF6 port of Marble for KPhotoAlbum and also KGeoTag. We now actively work on porting KPA to Qt6/KF6, but we need Marble to be able to finally release it. But we're confident everything will work out.

Hopefully, this won't be the last time we meet!

— Tobias