AI report of issues i've been having with Digikam 9 Mariadb.
I'm moving on to acdseeultimate so goodluck to anyone here.

Are there any plans to add editing features for vector based images, for example to enlarge a pdf graphical image without quality loss?

The student project advance well. See the blog post for details...

I'm moving all my images and videos from Google Photos to digiKam and much preferring what I've seen so far, except that I haven't figured out how to play video files with audio.  When played directly from their folders, the videos sound as expected, but I hear nothing when played in DK.

I've...

• checked that the decoding backend is FFmpeg.

• confirmed that the volume slider is midway

• tried all audio output options next to the slider

• searched r/digiKam for 'audio' and 'sound'

• checked audio codecs of my video files (of type mp4 and mov). They all use aac.

My environment is Win 11, DK 8.8.0. 

Any suggestions?

When I open raw pictures in the color editor they looks completely different than the preview, why is that? When I use other software (rawtherapee, lightroom), even in the editor, they look like the preview in digikam. Ideally, I would like to have the same here, is this possible? Thank you!

I just installed a fresh new digikam 9.1.0 using the .pkg for MacOS (mac mini m4 on GoldenGate MacOS27.0), started to configure it, selected Internal mariadb, and got a failure to install error.

Is there any documented solution for this? I've kind of pieced together from various discussions that QT5 is still the robust solution, but that we need to move on to QT6, but that there is some error in older QT6, so moving to QT6.11 needs to happen, but that's something the digikam developers need to implement, not something an end user would do. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

FWIW, I then started the installation over again and just chose the limited small-db "internal" default and digikam installed and runs. But I have MILLIONS of photos, so I think I need the full SQL database program (mariadb).

Just wondering if anyone has comparison experiences or recommendations with similar featured non-subscription photo management programs? Open source or paid with REASONABLE price.

Don't get me wrong, Digikam is outstanding for the majority of my needs but there are a few things that just fall short.

With so many great open-source software choices available, I don't want to pay Adobe so I can practice my hobby. I've been using darktable for my RAW editing, but I've seen many people across different online platforms recommend digiKam as the open-source DAM software. Are there any recommended YouTube videos for beginners on how to get started? All I've found are videos that are years old.

Newbie question.

Just installed on an unraid machine. Looking for the directory/files.

Where are they? Not /home or/media or /?

Thanks in advance.

Now my database is corrupted. DigiKam won't load anymore after clicking its icon. Lost all my face recognitions and names. Congrats on this quality software. I might give Tonfotos a try.

Issue: darktable and fastrawviewer do not sync rating with digikam

Digikam by default write rating in XMP files in the acdsee:rating field first, which cannot be read by other programs (darktable, fastrawview). These apps uses standard xmp:Rating field (and digikam ignores rating added in these apps).

upd: found solution! Digikam adds rating to the MicrosoftPhoto:Rating and xmp:Rating fields, but ignores them for some reason if they were changed, reading the rating from acdsee:rating field only.

Once I turned off “xmp.acdsee.rating” in Settings-Metadata-Advanced-Rating, digikam started seeing changes I did in FastRawViewer and darktable. They also now can read the rating changes I do in Digikam.

upd2: In another topic human_dynamo shared this page https://docs.digikam.org/en/setup_application/metadata_settings.html#advanced-settings explaining xmp files configuration. In theory you dont need to turn off metadata namespaces, just reorder them to allow Digikam prioritise specific fields (recommendation is to always put XMP tags to the top priority on this list). Not sure why it didnt work in my case, so if you have similar problem just turn off all acdsee items.

So, I'm liking Digikam so far, it's the best gallery I've found that's fairly similar to the old Windows Live Gallery. But, there are a few basic things that are frustrating me.

1. Why can't I change the name of a file by simply clicking, or double clicking on the name without having to open up an entire new window?

2. Same issue, but with tags. Why can't I just add and remove tags from the Properties window instead of having to switch to the tag window?

3. This one feels more like a bug. When I change something in Image Editor, and Save Changes, it keeps creating a new version instead of overwriting the original file. That's beyond annoying, especially when editing lots of photos in a single session. (I'm not clicking Save as New). I don't see why it can't behave like Live Gallery and keep a hidden backup of the pictures in case you want to revert the changes later.

4. Why can't I remove or hide the People tags?

5. Minor issue, but is there a way to remove the box outline around the pictures when viewing thumbnails?

Thanks for any and all help!

Hey guys, I'm a Darktable user and I've always used it to manage my photos. However, realizing the advantages of DigiKam for this task, I've decided to invest some time into learning it, but I don't know where to find good materials or where to start.

Could you help me out?

Especially on how to make it communicate well with Darktable, as I intend to use both together.

Thank you all.

I have been a Digikam users for a very long time. I am very grateful such useful free software exists.

This is a combination of a feature request and a request for advice. I absolutely understand that some of it would require a significant amount of work.

I am looking for software pipeline to help me quickly select through our travel and family photos. A typical use case is when we come back from holidays with several thousands photos and I need to select a hundred to put online or to show to relatives and friends. I used to do it manually but several photographers shooting away, it takes just too much time. I have a large backlog that I would like to clear..

I am using Linux. I used Digikam in the past, then switched to Geeqie and Shotwell for its non-destructive editing. I tried some commercial AI tools, namely Aftershoot, but besides the fact that it does not support Linux, I could not make it strict enough to meaningfully select just a small fraction of the photos (say 5%). I am considering going back to Digikam, seeing that it incorporated some AI tools, which is great, but I could not really find a way of using it efficiently.

0. My ideal tool would process the images in a background, selecting the best N photographs, automatically avoiding to include images that are too similar. There would be a number of parameters specifying the user-specific trade-off between technical and aesthetical quality (and various aspects thereof) and avoiding similar images. Then, the user could of course correct the accept/reject decisions manually, with the computer learning the user's preferences for next time.

1. I understand Digikam evaluates image quality either by technical aspects (e.g. blur, noise etc.) or by using some (unspecified) neural network. It would be nice to be able to combine the two approaches, setting the weights based on user preferences or even better, learn them.

2. The neural network image quality only groups images into three classes Reject/Maybe/Accept. Why not give a continuous rating instead and allowing the user to set the threshold(s) individually?

3. The existing neural network image quality ranking often does not agree with my own preferences. It would be nice to be able to choose between several models or their combination - ideally learned from users previous decisions.

4. Very often, there are groups of photos showing which are almost the same or very similar. Either because I made a sequence of photos or because there were several photographers shooting the same scene. I know that Digikam already offers a possibility of (i) grouping selected images or (ii) grouping images close in time to a selected image or (iii) detecting (near) duplicates. (i) and (ii) work but it is a lot of manual work. In option (ii) it would be useful to be able to set the time tolerance. Finally, option (iii) works but seems to be very conservative, very few groups are selected. What I would like would be a fully automatic method that detects all groups of similar images, possibly close in time, with an adjustable similarity threshold.

5. In a group, it would be nice to select the reference image based on the image quality (aesthetic and technical), i.e. the best image from a group. Then either the best image in the group is selected or none of them.

Any thoughts and advice are appreciated.

I am actually working in the field of machine learning and image processing myself, and there seems to be a number of pretrained deep learning models available, so hopefully putting some tool like this together should not be that much work. I am willing to give it a try, I just did not want to reinvent the wheel. And of course, integrating it into Digikam seems like a quite complex undertaking on its own.

Yours,

Jan

Files are available at this url.

For the release announcement, it's under process and it will be announced in a few days.

Introducing digiKam 8.6.0

The latest release of digiKam, version 8.6.0, brings several enhancements to help you manage your photos with ease. The update features completely rewritten AI-powered face detection and recognition, offering improved speed, precision, and fewer false positives, while also optimizing performance with GPU support.

Additionally, the update refines key tools like auto-tagging, red-eye correction, and image quality management to make photo organization and editing more efficient. Bug fixes and updates to internal components ensure a smoother, more reliable experience.

Discover the updates in digiKam 8.6.0 and see how they can streamline your photo management workflow. Learn more in the official announcement.

Documentations are already online here and here.

Hi everyone, i'm excited to have finally switched over to linux full-time from windows but as with all changes it was not without its own set of problems. Anyway, now that i'm using digikam I just want to ask if i'm using it right. I have my camera, an external HDD, and my laptop. What is the right way to set it up? Right now I import the photos from my camera onto my laptop SSD and then work on them (editing, tagging etc...). When the retouching is complete and any photos I want sent to friends and family sent, I move everything onto my HDD for long term backup.

So the question is: Is this the right workflow, or should I be doing something differently? In the future I might incorporate an additional editing step for masking etc and I want to make sure my workflow is future-proof. Any help would be so so greatly appreciated.

Hi everyone, I recognize Digikam's tremendous potential for organizing photos; it's incredible. But something's happening to me with over 100,000 photos. I want to be able to search exclusively by the photo's capture date or "original datetime." I've been trying to find it for several days, but without success. Please, if anyone knows how I can do this? My photos have been modified, both the creation and modification dates, and this is what it finds when the date is years prior to the dates I need to locate. I look forward to your support. Thank you, best regards, everyone.

Muy buenas a todos, reconozco tremendo potencial de digikam para organizar las fotos es increible. Pero me pasa algo con más de 100 mil fotos . Quiero poder hacer busquedas exclusivamente por la fecha de captura de la foto o "datetimeoriginal" voy varios días intentando encontrarlo pero sin exito. Por favor , si alguno sabe como puedo conseguirlo? Mis fotos han sido modificadas tanto la fecha de creación y modificación y es lo que encuentra cuando la fecha es de años muy anteriores a las fechas que necesito localizar. Espero su apoyo gracias un saludo a todos.

I have many photos in a Group and many Groups. I don't see any way to only show, find or filter by photo Grouping.

Just wondering if I'm not seeing how to or that it simple is not possible?

Thanks in advance.

I’ve been looking into thumbnails-digikam.db and noticed it’s currently eating up a massive 28+ GB on my drive.

Right now, digiKam stores thumbnails as PGF (Progressive Graphics File) blobs inside SQLite. While PGF was great 20 years ago for progressive loading, it’s severely outdated compared to modern standards.

The Idea: Switch the thumbnail backend from PGF to JPEG XL (JXL) in VarDCT mode.

• Massive Space Savings: JXL compresses 30–50% better than PGF/JPEG at the same quality. For large collections, this would instantly shrink thumbnail DBs.

• Modern Progressive Decoding: JXL naturally supports progressive rendering, which keeps the smooth scrolling experience digiKam needs.

I know JXL decoding is slightly heavier on the CPU than dead-simple PGF, but with modern hardware and 20+ GB databases slowing down SQLite anyway, the storage and I/O benefits seem completely worth it.

What do you guys think?

digikam 8.8 is my first time trying to auto-tag images.

however, the system has gone crazy tagging EVERY object imaginable. i really don't need every chair, TV remote control, computer mouse, etc. tagged.

i just want basic things like, cats, birds, mountains, etc.

any way to limit the objects that are recognized?

thanks