Software update: digiKam 4.0

Version 4.0 of digiKam has been released. This program is a photo management and image editing application for KDE and has downloads for Linux, BSD, OS X and Windows. It includes support for various file formats and can also be provided with more options via plug-ins, such as exporting an album to Facebook or Flickr. More about the possibilities of this program is on this page to find. Version 4.0 includes many improvements, thanks in part to contributions from the Google Summer of Code 2013. The release notes for this release are as follows:

digiKam Software Collection 4.0.0 released…

digiKam team is proud to announce the release of digiKam Software Collection 4.0.0. This version, include many new features introduced by completed GSoC 2013 projects:

• A new tool dedicated to organize whole tag hierarchies. This new feature is relevant of GoSC-2013 project from Veaceslav Munteanu. Veaceslav has also implemented multiple selection and multiple drag-n-drop capabilities on Tags Manager and Tags View from sidebars, and the support for writing face rectangles metadata in Windows Live Photo format.
• A new maintenance tool dedicated to parse image quality and auto-tags items automatically using Pick Labels. This tool is relevant to another GoSC-2013 project from Gowtham Ashok.
• Showfoto thumbbar is now ported to Qt model/view in order to switch later full digiKam code to Qt5. This project is relevant to another GoSC-2013 project from Mohamed Anwer.
• A lots of work have been done into Import tool to fix several dysfunctions reported since a very long time. For example, The status to indicate which item have been already downloaded from the device is back. Thanks to Teemu Rytilahti and Islam Wazery to contribute. All fixes are not yet completed and the game continues until the next beta release.
• This release is now fully ported to Qt4 model-view and drop last Q3-Support classes. The last pending part was Image Editor Canvas ported and completed by Yiou Wang through this GoSC-2013 project. In the future, port to Qt5 will be easy and quickly done, when KDE 5 API will stabilized and released.
• This release also include the multi-core CPU support for severals tools which require a lots of computing, as Sharpen, LocalContrast, Noise Reduction, and all visual effects tools.

As usual with a major release, we have a long list of files closed with this release into KDE bugzilla.