Digikam 7.0: Open-source photo management

https://www.digikam.org/news/2020-07-19-7.0.0_release_announcement/

by ekianjo • 6 years ago

274 130 6 years ago

I haven't tried this out yet, but from the release notes it sounds like the new facial recognition system will be better than I am. I am not good at recognizing faces and have been waiting for quite some time for a good open source tool to recognize faces with.

agumonkey2• 6 years ago

Never thought of people with facial agnosia.. someone make an app !

nqzero• 6 years ago

google glass was gonna be heaven ...

blendergeek3• 6 years ago

According to Wikipedia it is called prosopagnosia [1]. I have never been formally diagnosed, but I cannot even recognize the faces of my own family members to save my life. Having software that sorts faces will be great. Given that I only use open source software, I am quite excited for this new release.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia

morsch3• 6 years ago

Can I attach the face-tags to the RAW file (or the XMP, I guess) and use them in other applications, specifically darktable?

Youden• 6 years ago

Yes but you need to configure Digikam to write metadata in its settings. Should be able to write to either EXIF or XMP.

virtualmic2• 6 years ago

Sorry for somewhat unrelated query: is Digikam a replacement for Darktable? If not what's a good workflow between the two? I am a hobbyist photo taker and have only recently started using Darktable and really enjoy using it. However, it isn't a very efficient photo manager in my opinion (I may very well be missing something).

black_puppydog3• 6 years ago

I would say they're complementary. Digikam is more of an all-around organizer and has lots of import/export stuff, tagging, and now good face recognition too apparently (the old one was based on classic Haar cascades).

Darktable is for selecting a series of shots, going through them, developing the ones you want to keep.

virtualmic2• 6 years ago

Thanks, I will try Digikam too.

MR4D• 6 years ago

Which would you use to replace Picasa (on a Mac) ?

toredash• 6 years ago

Would you say I replaces iPhoto/Photos on Mac?

throw0101a• 6 years ago

lots of import/export stuff, tagging

So perhaps closer to Photo Mechanic?

_visgean• 6 years ago

Darktable is mostly for RAW processing, Digikam is for organization / tagging afaik.

caseyf7• 6 years ago

What is considered the best DAM (digital asset manager) for photos?

BlackLotus892• 6 years ago

https://www.digikam.org/news/2019-11-09-6.4.0_release_announ...

Search for "External Raw Import Tools as Plugins". I suggest you take a look at rawtherapee as well. I personally use both darktable and rawtherapee and find rawtherapee to be better suited for some usecases.

jhoechtl• 6 years ago

KDE software is so great (digiKam, Kdenlive, Kate, Krita) unfortunately the KDE environment compared to Gnome is just so bug-ridden, especially when it comes to multi-monitoring, wayland-support and scaling. Gnome shines in these respecst. I wish thebest of both worlds!

ekianjo• 6 years ago

especially when it comes to multi-monitoring,

It's getting better on the multi monitor front at least

brnt• 6 years ago

I don't really have problems with multi monitor and KDE.

beojan2• 6 years ago

Nor do I.

d4rti• 6 years ago

Same here, running a pair of 1440p monitors off my Hades Canyon NUC, running Kubuntu 20.04.

Largely now without tweaks, but it needed some when I originally got it to use Kisak-mesa.

neofetch output: OS: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS x86_64 Host: NUC8i7HVK (REMOVED) Kernel: 5.4.0-42-generic Uptime: 5 hours, 7 mins Packages: 3266 (dpkg), 7 (snap) Shell: bash 5.0.17 Resolution: 2560x1440, 2560x1440 DE: Plasma WM: KWin Theme: Breeze [Plasma], Breeze [GTK2/3] Icons: breeze [Plasma], breeze [GTK2/3] Terminal: konsole CPU: Intel i7-8809G (8) @ 4.200GHz GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX Vega M GH GPU: Intel HD Graphics 630 Memory: 8898MiB / 32031MiB

berkut• 6 years ago

I do - every time I unlock my screen, Plasma crashes, and my windows get randomly distributed around my virtual desktops.

Oddly enough, if I only have one monitor enabled, it doesn't happen. And yes, I've nuked my preferences several times.

alexktz3• 6 years ago

Multi-monitor works well for me but I have one annoying issue which is that one line of pixels bleeds over the edge of one monitor into the next.

est312• 6 years ago

Wayland support in KDE is improving as we speak. Two recent improvements:

* https://pointieststick.com/2020/07/24/this-week-in-kde-scree...

* https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=373907#c29

thekyle• 6 years ago

At least their apps are pretty DE agnostic. I use them on Cinnamon mainly and sometimes Windows.

michaelmrose3• 6 years ago

I believe the preferred environment for KDE is one in which you are liable to have the most recent libraries including bug fixes which sadly has often not been the case for people using kde + ubuntu.

pezezin2• 6 years ago

My experience is totally the opposite. In fact, at work we are now migrating many of our computers from GNOME to KDE because we are really tired of GNOME's bugs (and it's "too simple to the point of being useless" interface).

alexktz3• 6 years ago

The grass is always greener!

I can assure you that there are plenty of bugs on both sides :)

takeda6• 6 years ago

I stopped using Ubuntu 10 years ago, because I couldn't stand how buggy it was, but later I realized it was mostly GNOME. It's interesting how things turned around.

Edit: looking at other responses it seems that this still holds true, perhaps it's just Wayland support that's buggy, because it is new.

aidenn02• 6 years ago

I can't speak to Wayland support, but almost all the bugs I've seen with plasma appear to be GPU specific. My laptop with Intel graphics runs KDE rock solid, while my desktops with Nvidia cards have all sorts of issues, and nouveau had different issues compared to the binary drivers.

techntoke2• 6 years ago

I'm currently using Google Photos for facial recognition, however since they broke their Google Drive integration I'd like to move away from it. For now I am using a combination of Syncthing, the Google Photos interface and rclone.

Is there an API or potential to use this in headless for integration in other apps such as web or Android? What about the automated cards and animations that Google Photos creates? Is there anything like that for Digikam or another app that can be self-hosted?

stalker3142• 6 years ago

Nextcloud is self-hosted solution and there is plugin for it that allows you to recognize and cluster faces (to persons) using DLib: https://github.com/matiasdelellis/facerecognition. This might be close to what you need (while Nextcloud is huge software on its own, it is not best photo management app)

techntoke2• 6 years ago

Thanks.

andialo• 6 years ago

How reliable is the face recognition in 7.0? In older versions it was not as good as closed source software like picasa.

chris_st• 6 years ago

See the "Deep-Learning Powered Faces Management" section of the linked document for a lot more information. Specifically, they mention that they replaced the old (OpenCV) algorithm with a new neural-net based one.

stalker3142• 6 years ago

If it is same software https://github.com/matiasdelellis/facerecognition has been using (DLib, King's face model) - I can say it is very, very good! Yes, there can be lamppost here and there, but it is miles ahead of OpenCV haar cascade

takeda6• 6 years ago

In they link they said that previous version was about 80% successful, now it's 95% and doesn't have issues with blurred images, profiles, various obstructions, pet faces etc.

gsich6• 6 years ago

Maybe they have now what Picasa did 7 years ago.

pbhjpbhj• 6 years ago

This comment seems mean, perhaps. But, Picasa's facial recognition was far better than Digikam's and I marveled at how Picasa could do so quickly, so long ago, what Digikam has failed to do (until now?).

I've been a Digikam user for a long time now, it's really useful for me, but the whole face-tagging system has been really poor for a long time IMO (eg all faces recognised in one image as same person; all tags recognised as being the last person manually tagged).

It's one thing I'd love to have donated to a bounty on as it saves a lot of time to have working tagging.

I wonder if there are plans to add other types of tagging, object recognition or what-have-you.

black_puppydog3• 6 years ago

Yeah, the the comment does sound mean. Not to blame you, since you indicate that you understand this. The digikam devs can be court at times, but that's mostly because many people show up with great expectations; mostly expectations of having someone else implement this or that. I shouldn't throw stones here really, I was one of those people a few years back.

The project is huge and the core dev team quite small [1], essentially just two people and the occasional drive-by. This is one of those projects that I'd really like to see someone figure out a stable revenue stream. I'd guess that a lot of this is not "interesting" programming, but rather tedious "clocking in, clocking out" footwork.

[1] https://github.com/KDE/digikam/graphs/contributors

StavrosK5• 6 years ago

I think that comment is more "Picasa was amazing" than "Digikam is bad", and it's right, Picasa was amazing. Hopefully Digikam will reach those levels soon.

vespenegas• 6 years ago

Maybe they have now what Picasa did 7 years ago.

I hear ya, brother! I still have the final version of Picasa for Windows and Linux. What a shame it's proprietary.

dreamcompiler• 6 years ago

I'm happy to hear this and hope it works. Apple's iPhoto used to do good face recognition but as soon as you exported photos the information was lost. I hope this can store the face rectangles and their IDs in the photo's metadata.

notyourday10• 6 years ago

Every year for at least last 5 years I have been trying Digikam. Every year like 99.9% of the reasonably complicated GUI-based single process multi-functional software written on Linux it would blow up while working with marginally large sets of files (~ 50k photos, roughly evenly split between 24 megapixel NEF files and random resolution jpegs )

It is just sad to see that the imaging/image processing/image organizing world is still stuck in 1990s paradigm rather than embrace that the computers have gobs of memory, a single application can be composed of dozen of individual components talking to each other over 127.0.0.1 and background jobs is a thing.

akerro2• 6 years ago

I've been using it since 2011 and no problems with anything. Over 200k photos.

notyourday10• 6 years ago

The infamous "Works on my laptop"

tomc19852• 6 years ago

You can do multithreaded without client-server or multiprocess

notyourday10• 6 years ago

And crash in the most spectacular way.

gsich6• 6 years ago

Had the same problem, with an even larger dataset. Picasa on the other hand had no problem with it.

But huge albums are a problem for many programs, unfortunateley.

notyourday10• 6 years ago

I had dozens of photographer friends try importing their multi TB photo libraries into different Linux systems using all kinds of photo management software. They all choke. Shotwell is the most stable but even it will crash every few few weeks and that would periodically require reimporting all the photos again...

mceachen8• 6 years ago

You just described the architecture of PhotoStructure: https://photostructure.com/server/photostructure-for-servers...

(Not a dozen components, though; just four. A main/watchdog service, a web service, a volume watchdog and directory scanner service, and a cluster of sync-file jobs).

Related: it was a total pita to handle real-time debugging until I made my own `tail -f` that sorted by timestamp and automatically updated as new processes added new log files).

notyourday10• 6 years ago

Thanks, I'm going to play with it as it is the closest thing to what I think can function well even though I did not mean using a web browser as an interface.

laythea3• 6 years ago

We are working on a multi-process GPU accelerated image viewer with the ability to seamlessly browse and organise through hundreds of thousands of photos. Although it is multi process, all applications are embedded in a container application. The processes communicate using 127.0.0.1. All done locally.

It was specifically designed to handles hundreds of thousands of images and is in the final stages of release.

We have a little bit more information and screenshots on the website: https://www.pixolage.com and would be grateful for any community feedback (or beta testers!).

Disclaimer: I work at Pixolage

gsich6• 6 years ago

Picasa can do it on a mediocre CPU, single threaded. That's the benchmark you should aim at.

notyourday10• 6 years ago

Seems to be Windows only, no?

account42• 6 years ago

I find it ironic that you complain about applications being stuck in the 90s and then use 127.0.0.1 instead of ::1 or just localhost.

sergiotapia• 6 years ago

Are the people tags saved to the photo's file metadata somehow? I've thrown about 130,000 photos up to google photos for safe-keeping but want a second set of redundancy.

unicornporn• 6 years ago

XMP I assume.

throwaway1892622• 6 years ago

Just so you know... Google Photos is full of dark patterns. For example there's no way to mass delete pictures. It simply doesn't exist.

There's a janky browser script on GitHub that you inject into the page to delete your photos. That's what I had to use when I migrated to OneDrive.

And some Android phones are configured to automatically upload to Google Photos to "save space" on the device. I recovered thousands of lost photos for my parents that got deleted from their phones and uploaded to Google without their knowledge. My Dad has been backing up his photos for years, but half were missing from the backup because I found them on Google photos.

It took the browser automation script hours to delete all their photos after I got them out.

Even worse, when I was trying to remove duplicates from the set, I found that Google alters the metadata of the photos you export. So when you try to compare them you can't use regular diff tools

mceachen8• 6 years ago

No. I'd love to be wrong, btw: please correct me if I'm wrong.

(I've looked at the sidecars from takeout, and the API). You might be able to scrape the metadata via puppeteer, but that's brittle and janktastic.

pmcjones3• 6 years ago

If you use the Album>Write Metadata to Files command, it will do so. (I just tested adding a Face Tag to a photo. In Settings>Configure>Metadata, I also checked the box next to Face Tags under Write This Information to the Metadata. This latter action didn't seem to be enough by itself.)

est312• 6 years ago

I checked out Digikam recently because my camera didn't support PTP but instead a custom protocol and I wanted to copy pictures over (Dolphin had no support). Sadly, Digikam had to mess with the metadata of each picture and put its name inside. Which contribution has the program done other than download the picture from the camera? So I went to using an SD card reader instead.

cortesoft• 6 years ago

Since this is an open source project, could you remove that part of the code?

tokai• 6 years ago

You can configure what is added to the metadata in the settings.

indymike• 6 years ago

Digikam has always been a gem. This sounds like a great improvement.

tempodox• 6 years ago

It would be nice if it could display UTF-8 text. Apparently it only uses ISO 8859-1.

skoskie• 6 years ago

The linked post specifically says it supports UTF-8. Might double check the settings.

schoolornot• 6 years ago

The macOS version is distributed as a .pkg and isn't signed or notarized. That's a no-go for me. Any reason why they don't just ship a .app in a disk image?

the_why_of_y• 6 years ago

Most likely because nobody on the development team has the time to keep up with Apple's treadmill of ever changing Gatekeeper requirements. If you're knowledgeable about such matters, see it as your chance to contribute.

gsich6• 6 years ago

Signing costs money, if you want it signed I guess you can donate that amount of money to them.

BugWatch• 6 years ago

Sadly, even at version 7.0, it (Digikam) still doesn't support virtual albums/collections, and it insists on direct album-file_system_directory correlation. Unfortunently, it is useless to me as an image/photo organizer. (I don't really see tags as a substitute).

tmp538394722• 6 years ago

Can you help me understand what you’re looking for in a “virtual album” feature that isn’t achieved by tags?

pmcjones3• 6 years ago

Being able to specific a particular sequence for the photos in a "virtual album" that is different than, say, their capture date or filename.

tobtoh• 6 years ago

I wish there was photo management software which catered to non-enterprise multi-user environments.

ie families, or small organizations where the photos (and database) would reside on a computer, but other users on their computers could access it via the local network.

At the moment, this middle ground doesn't seem to exist. It's either single-user only photo management software or full-blown multi-user digital asset management software with enterprise-level pricing.

gsich6• 6 years ago

Me too. My "solution" is to have the photo software running at one PC and use RDP (or whatever you like) to access it.

mceachen8• 6 years ago

PhotoStructure is absolutely designed for self-hosted family-and-friends access of local photos and videos. You'll get installation instructions emailed to you shortly after you subscribe to the beta. https://PhotoStructure.com

(Disclaimer: I'm the author, and wished the same thing you did, so I quit my job to build it).

alexktz3• 6 years ago

Any chance the website could show a screenshot or something? It’s just a generic thing right now and I have no interest in signing up to something I can’t see.

stanboyet• 6 years ago

Just read your first blog post, I signed up. But +1 for the screenshots on your website, it does not work as an illustration of the product.

aidenn02• 6 years ago

Is it possible to get digikam to store files in a simple date based directory structure? I really wanted to like digikam, but ended up using rapid-photo-downloader instead because it was so easy to setup that way, and it keeps me from being too locked in to software that might go away.

canada_dry• 6 years ago

Bah! I was really hoping Digikam's face recognition was going to work at least as well as the 10+ yr old Picassa that I'm trying to replace... but I'm not having any luck - pretty disappointing matching. Even with dozens of images manually identified it is failing to match the same person correctly in other pictures.

Plus, the interface is confusing and not very efficient (in aiding the matching/identification process).

BlackLotus892• 6 years ago

Then you will be happy to know that they are working on exactly those problems right now (see the article part and look for summer of code).

As you can see, work is advancing very well and we expect to publish new code later this summer, probably for digiKam 7.2.0 when all implementations will be tested and ready for production.

Digikam 7.0: Open-source photo management

Related Stories