digiKam, KDE’s full-featured photo management software, releases version 8.6.0.
You can look forward to a smarter face management tool, an improved auto-tagging system that identifies elements in your images, fully automatic red-eye removal, and a new image quality feature that classifies images according to their aesthetic quality.
We also fixed 140 bugs!
https://www.digikam.org/news/2025-03-15-8.6.0/_release/_announcement/
I have used digiKam for years on Windows, it is great!
I often export HTML photo galleries and upload to a private web hotel where I build a pretty Index page in HTML and CSS, everything is blazingly fast.
@stoy @kde can you share more about your setup? I’d love to have a desktop application to manage my photos and just generate pages when I want to publish!
Sure.
My setup is technically horrible.
All my personal photos are stored on a single mechanical hard drive in my computer.
There are zero backups apart from an old Intel NAS that I keep as a cold backup of most of my other media, it has not been updated in several years, and has old drives that was used when I got it more then a decade ago.
What I am trying to say is that while my setup might seem nice, it is awful.
I have thought about getting a NAS for years and one day I will wake up and start blasting the Scorpion song Someday Is Now, and as the blood rains down across the tundra, my feet will rain down on the sidewalk on Sveavägen as I go and buy a NAS.
Anyway, take my technical setup as a warning on what not to do even though it is possible.
So yeah, my setup is pretty basic, I have a Windows 10 machine (which I may try and migrate to Linux as October gets closer…), I run digiKam 7.3.0 IIRC, digiKam uses a root folder on a single HDD as a library folder.
In the Library folder I have a folder structure like this
…/<YEAR>/<LOCATION/EVENT> <SERIALNUMBER> <YEAR>/
Example:
…/2024/Arlanda 4 2024/
This is an ok system that works for me, it almost mirrors the standard I used when naming photos I uploaded to deviantArt, then I added another serialnumber to the end.
I use a Lumix S5 camera, and have it set to save both HQ JPEG and RAW, I am planning on adding a Sony A7 IV and a few lenses more to my collection.
digiKam handles Lumix RAW files fine
@stoy @sono 😱
I have a system that backs up every machine on my network to an 8TB RAID1 with a week of history, and that is then pushed to a harddrive a friend is hosting for me… OK that might be a bit extreme, but the technology is there, and I have at least one friend!
Also DigiKam is great.
Yeah, I have friends, but not IT savy friends who I would trust could keep a system exposed to the internet updated, I am an IT guy, I don’t want to be responsible for keeping their system updated, or be the guy who punched a hole in their firewall if they get hit by a zero day.
@stoy and what do you use to generate the html pages from your digikam photos?
Sorry about leaving you hanging, I fell asleep.
Yeah, exporting galleries in digiKam, you get several options for theming and other settings.
You simply select the phots in a folder, in the order you want them, run the wizard in digiKam and bam, you have an HTML gallery that is fast and simple to navigate.
How many photos do you manage? I have… a lot.
My personal photo collection is 1TB with 66185 files…
I am a hobby photographer and last year I captured about 14500 pictures
Good to hear. I’m in the same ballpark, so if you’re happy with it, I will be too. Thanks.