It's effortless to manage photos on Linux thanks to some really great software that offer powerful organization, editing, and automation tools, all without needing pricey licenses from proprietary providers.
Among those, digiKam stands out, providing a ton of features while being a fully open source and community-driven solution. With the release of digiKam 8.7, it has received some useful upgrades that further enhance its capabilities.
digiKam 8.7: What's New?
One of the most notable highlights in this release is the introduction of an AI-powered auto-rotation tool that automatically detects the correct orientation of images using deep learning. Earlier, people had to manually rotate images or apply a fixed rotation value to an entire batch, which was inefficient when dealing with photos taken at different angles.
This has been integrated into the Batch Queue Manager for quick batch processing of images that need rotating.
Similarly, digiKam 8.7 adds new options to check if your system can use the GPU for AI tasks, leveraging OpenCL via OpenCV for general GPU support, and CuDNN SDK through the CUDA framework for NVIDIA GPUs.
Plus, you can also turn off OpenCL just for the reference engine if required, and there's a new test button in the settings to make sure GPU support is working right.
As for the internal tooling, this release comes equipped with Qt 6.8.3 for Linux and Windows and Qt 6.9 for macOS, with updates to the RAW decoder Libraw supporting over 1,260 camera models and a recent ExifTool version for more efficient metadata management.
The AI-powered face recognition system also gets upgrades, with digiKam now being able to remember when you reject a suggested face match and automatically offer the next best option, making tagging more accurate and efficient. Additionally, you can enable automatic face scans whenever new faces are confirmed or tagged by going into:
Beyond these new additions, digiKam 8.7 includes the following improvements:
Several fixes for the face management workflow.
digiKam no longer remains active in memory after quitting.
PKG installation issues on a recent macOS version have been resolved.
Translations have been updated, with digiKam now supporting 61 interface languages and offering documentation in 16 languages (use the switcher on the bottom-left).
Get digiKam 8.7
The official website has links to the various packages for Linux, Windows, and macOS. By default, it should pick the download mirror closest to you, but if you face slow downloads, then you can always choose a different download mirror.
The source code is hosted over on KDE's GitLab instance.
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Ankush Das
