There are many improvements including a cleaner user interface, improved performance, a new thumbnail bar, XMP support, ability to run on Mac OS X, GPS tagging using Google Maps, multiple album collections supporting collections on network shares and removable media, and auto gamma and white balance with RAW. Digikam is also the first open source photography tool with 16-bit colour depth support. Gilles Caulier tells all.

We have plans to release 0.10.0 in September, if all goes well.

Regression tests will take a while. I would not provide a "stable" release full of bugs.

As you can see, porting of Qt 3/KDE 3 application like Digikam, K3B or Amarok to Qt 4/KDE 4 is not a simple task. Because changes in the API are huge, all elements must be tested, and some parts even re-written. The advantage of this approach is review of all old code with refactorisation, simplification and various other improvements.

Digikam 0.10 is still in alpha. I advise against use of it in production, at least until the first release candidate.

There are also kipi-plugins and all shared libraries where Marcel and me are working hard to port to native QT 4/KDE 4:

• libkdcraw (including new 16 bits color depth auto-gamma/auto white balance)
• libexiv2 (including new full XMP metadata support)
• libkipi (partially re-written and cleaned).
• 7 kipi-plugins fully ported by me (SendImages, RAWConverter, JPEGLossLess, FlashExport, TimeAdjust, MetadataEdit, and AcquireImage).

I present here a few screenshots of Digikam for KDE 4 in action.

As you can see, a lot of work has been done to design a clean interface, moving away from the traditional dialog requiring to build a search step-by-step with comboboxes, and towards a page which offers the available options at a glance, at the same time retaining the ability to create complex searches. With this approach we hope to create something more user friendly. It is not finished yet, the UI in the screenshot can be considered a preview, but we want to finalise this interface for the Beta 1 release.

The need to redesign the search interface came with the rewrite and improvement of our database schema. Now, much more photo metadata information will be stored and will be available for searching. For example, GPS information will now be stored in the database, which means that read-only files (think of your RAW images) can as well be geo-coded.

In Digikam for KDE 4, thumbnail kio-slave disappears. All thumbnail images are now generated using multi-threading (another part implemented by Marcel) If you have already played with Showfoto, you have certainly seen a thumbbar. The KDE 3 implementation used kioslaves without a memory cache mechanism. It was slow. The new mechanism is faster and can be included everywhere in Digikam without a decrease in performance. I have included the thumbbar in the Image Editor (F4) and in the AlbumGUI with Preview mode (F3). The same cache is used everywhere.

In KDE 4, XMP is fully supported. I have improved the Metadata Editor kipi-plugin and rewritten all dialog pages to be more user friendly, and to be more similar to other tools available under Mac OS X or Windows.

Gustavo Boiko, have ported some parts of Digikam to compile as a native application under Mac OS X.

For KDE 4, I have fixed libkipi to become a pure image collection interface: no widgets, no dialogs, no translations. All GUI components have to be re-implemented in kipi-host using the right model/view implementation. For Digikam, I have already implemented all of them. The advantage is really visible here: the tree view used for all physical/virtual albums in Digikam can be used as well with all kipi-plugins (KDE 3 only provide a flat albums list, which is not really suitable).

For KDE 4, I have also implemented a new tool to edit a GPS track list of several images at the same time. This tool uses Google Maps, but there are plans to use Marble if necessary, especially when the user does not have network access.

With KDE 4, multiple root album paths are supported, including removable media and network repositories. There will be no problems with using Digikam with a NFS server to host your images.

Full colour theme interface: this was also backported to KDE 3. Now colour schemes are applied everywhere within the GUI. With dark themes (my preferred scheme), Digikam looks similar to professional software available commercially.

This is a very important feature: auto-gamma and auto-white balance with all RAW file format using 16-bit colour depth! Before, 16-bit colour depth support required use of colour management to have a suitable image in the editor. Without colour management, the user would see only a black hole image. This is due to limitations of the dcraw library, which does not provide a homogenous interface between 8-bit and 16-bit colour depth workflow.

In these screenshots, you can compare the same RAW image decoded:

• On the left by dcraw in 8 bits colour depth and converted to PNG. Auto-gamma and auto white balance is performed automatically by dcraw.
• On the middle by Digikam in 16 bits colour depth using libkdcraw with a dedicated auto-gamma and auto-white-balance performed in Digikam core.
• On the right by the LightZone... As you can see, Digikam is not bad!

Digikam is now able to play with all RAW images in 16-bit colour depth without to use complex colour management settings: in your workflow RAW pictures can be handled like JPEG files. This is a very productive and fast method: for example, LightZone uses this style of workflow. Note that this feature was also backported to KDE 3.

I would like to remind to everyone that Digikam has been the first suitable open source photo-management program with support for 16-bit colour depth pictures as well! Even GIMP or F-Spot do not support it! Cinepaint can do it, but seriously, who will use it to play with pictures? Of course we have Krita to also work with layers. We want Digikam with Krita to be considered the perfect photo suite.

On a final note, we would like Digikam to take part in Google Summer of Code: here is a list of potential projects.

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