digiKam 8.2 brings many bug fixes and enhancements, with auto-tags support coming for 2024

The open-source digital photo manager, digiKam, has announced the release of version 8.2.0 after five months of active maintenance and extensive bug triage. This release primarily focuses on bug fixes, with no new features included.

Improvements have been made in several areas of the software, including the GEO Tag Editor, the ability to remove “Unknown” face tags from a photo, and the editing of RAW images with ART, RawTherapee, or Darktable 2 Gmic. Other enhancements include the saving of tags on exit, Tesseract OCR, and the conversion of Panasonic rw2 files to DNG.

The team has dedicated considerable time to fixing long-standing bugs present in older versions. They have also been actively contacting users to validate changes in the pre-release stage to ensure the effectiveness of the fixes before deploying the program in production.

The internationalization of the application has also been updated, with digiKam and Showfoto now available in 61 different languages for the graphical interface.

In a significant shift, the cross-compiled version has been dropped in favor of a native Windows 10 build using the open-source Microsoft VCPKG tool-chain. The native Microsoft compiler is now used to build the application, ensuring better compatibility at runtime.

The Windows version has transitioned from the Qt and KDE frameworks version 5 to version 6. However, the macOS and Linux bundles are still operating with Qt version 5, with plans for an upgrade in the pipeline.

Looking ahead, the next maintenance version is scheduled for publication in February 2024, promising further bug fixes and improvements. Notably, this version will introduce a significant new feature: Auto-Tags support.