digiKam: all versions and old releases

Dear digiKam fans and users,
After three months of active development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is proud to announce the stable release of digiKam 9.1.0. This version builds on the foundation of 9.0.0, introducing new features, performance improvements, and a significant number of bug fixes to enhance stability, usability, and workflow efficiency. This release focuses on database migration, preview enhancements, advanced search, and usability improvements across the board.

Dear digiKam fans and users,
After months of intensive development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is thrilled to announce the stable release of digiKam 9.0.0. This major version introduces groundbreaking improvements in performance, usability, and workflow efficiency, with a strong focus on modernizing the user interface, enhancing metadata management, and expanding support for new camera models and file formats.
- New Features and Major Changes
- General Updates and Porting
- Bundles Component Versions
- Raw Camera Support
- User Interface and Usability
- Metadata and Tag Management
- Preview and Media Support
- New Survey Tool
- Editor and Plugins
- New Advanced Search and Sorting Options
- Geolocation Editor
- Performance and Stability
- Notable Bug Fixes
- Internationalization
- Future Plans
- Final Words

New Features and Major Changes
General Updates and Porting
digiKam 9.0.0 marks a significant milestone with the core code now fully ported to Qt 6.10.1 for the AppImage and macOS bundles, ensuring improved performance, security, and compatibility with modern operating systems. The Windows Qt6 bundle also benefits from the latest Qt 6.9.1 and KDE Frameworks 6.20.0.

Dear digiKam fans and users,
After four months of active development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is proud to announce the stable release of digiKam 8.8.0. This version delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on image processing, color management, and workflow efficiency.
- New Features and Major Changes
- General Updates and Porting
- Tag Management
- Preview and Camera Support
- Color Management
- Editor and Plugins
- Internal Components Update
- Notable Bug Fixes
- Generalities
- Future Plans
- Final Words
The digiKam team remains committed to providing a powerful, open-source digital photo management solution, continuously enhanced with new tools and optimizations for photographers and enthusiasts alike.

Dear digiKam fans and users,
After four months of active maintenance and many weeks triaging bugs, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager.
- New Features and Major Changes
- Face Management Updates and Improvements
- OpenCV OpenCL and CUDA Support
- AI Auto-Rotation Tool
- Internal Components Update
- Notable Bug Fixes
- Generalities
- Future Plans
- Final Words
The digiKam team has continued to work the Artificial Intelligence integration in digiKam, and many parts have been improved with the 8.7.0 release.

Dear digiKam fans and users,
After four months of active maintenance and many weeks triaging bugs, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.6.0 of its open source digital photo manager.
- New Features and Major Changes
- Face Management Updates and Improvements
- Auto-Tags Management
- Image Quality Management
- Red Eye Correction
- Internal Components Update
- Notable Bug Fixes
- Generalities
- Future Plans
- Final Words
The digiKam team has continued to work on a better Artificial Intelligence integration in digiKam, and many parts have been improved with the 8.6.0 release.

Dear digiKam fans and users,
After five months of active maintenance and many weeks triaging bugs, the digiKam team is proud to present version 8.5.0 of its open source digital photo manager.
Generalities
More than 160 bugs have been fixed and we spent a lot of time contacting users to validate changes in pre-release versions to confirm fixes before deploying the program to production.
Application internationalization has also been updated. digiKam and Showfoto are released with 61 different languages for the graphical interface. Go to the Settings/Configure Languages dialog and change the localization as you want. digiKam needs to be restarted to apply the changes. If you want to contribute to the internationalization of digiKam, please contact the translator teams, following the translation how-to. The statistics about translation states are available here.

Thanks to the translators who have worked on the online documentation internationalisations which is now available in 16 languages as French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and more. You can read and search over the documentation here. You are welcome to contribute to application handbook translations following the coordination team instructions.

Internal Components Update
This version arrives with the internal RAW decoder Libraw updated to the rolling-release snapshot 2024-09-10, including bugfixes.

For metadata management, the industry-standard open-source component ExifTool has been updated in all bundles to the latest 12.99 release. Additionally, the well-known shared library Exiv2 has been upgraded to version 0.28.3.

Native Apple Silicon Package
A native macOS package for the Apple Silicon arm64 architecture is now available for the first time. This package leverages Qt6 framework version 6.7.2, KDE framework 6.7.0, and FFmpeg 6.1 to facilitate video media playback. Importantly, it no longer necessitates the use of the Apple Rosetta 2 emulator.
The journey to develop an Apple Silicon package was lengthy and involved. It required acquiring new Apple devices and setting up the environment to configure, compile, and test all necessary packages. This milestone marks the completion of the full port to the Qt version 6 framework across all Windows, macOS, and Linux bundles.
Please note that the previous macOS package based on the Qt5 framework will still be supported for legacy Intel Apple computers.

Notable Bug Fixes
- Fix wrong ExifTool packaging in the bundles 490341 488222
- Usability improvements of the progress manager 375519
- Better OpenCL support while intensive calculations with the OpenCV framework 495014
- Better ICC profiles support 495646
- Better large TIFF file format support with a new solid identification in the database 488662 490859
- Better date and time formats support 490552 491804 493388
- New Apple extensions supported with HEIF file format 494304
- New option to not blur pixels at high zoom level in preview mode 431788 491580

New Features
Face Management Updates and Improvements
A new contributor named Michael Miller joined the team a few months ago. As a long time digiKam user with an excellent developer skills, he decided first to help us on the native macOS Silicon port, and more recently to improve Face Management with a long list of closed reports.
The current release boasts several enhancements and improvements to the Face Management feature. New deep-learning models have been integrated into the face pipeline, making face detection and recognition faster and more accurate.

YuNet is now the default model for face detection, outperforming the previous MobileNetSSD and YOLO v3 models in both speed and accuracy. It offers more configuration options to enhance overall accuracy and allows users to fine-tune face detection for specific scenarios, such as large group photos and portrait photography.

Significant improvements have also been made to face recognition. SFace is now the default deep-learning model for face recogniti