06 Feb 2019 19:38 +0000
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!
14 Oct 2018 19:06 +0000
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.
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:
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.
Here's an alphabetically sorted list of people who contributed to this release.
Thanks for all the work!
20 Jan 2018 14:19 +0000
We are pleased to announce the new release 5.3 of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management software!
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 ;-).
The git log shows contributions of the following persons:
Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release!
03 Mar 2017 18:46 +0000
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):
According to git log, the following persons contributed code:
Thanks to everyone who put work in this release!
20 Dec 2016 18:14 +0000
We are very pleased to announce the new release KPhotoAlbum 5.1. The following things are new:
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.
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 :-)
From the ChangeLog:
The git log says that the following individuals pushed code:
Thanks to everybody who worked on this release!
Original design & code: Jaroslav Holaň | Content: The KPhotoAlbum Development Team