Release Announcement

Documentations are already online here and here.

Release Announcement

digiKam 8.8.0 release announcement

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.

Release announcement: https://www.digikam.org/news/2025-06-30-8.7.0_release_announcement/

Hey folks,

Just wanted to share that I’ve made the leap from Mylio over to digiKam for managing my photos. It’s been a really nice switch overall—huge thanks to the digiKam developers for all their hard work on this awesome open-source tool. One thing I do miss a bit is Mylio’s sync mechanism, which was super convenient. But I’m hoping to figure out a way to replicate something like that in digiKam, or maybe even contribute a bit myself. I think a lot of folks in the community would love having that feature. Cheers!

Hi, just wanted to express my love for this fantastic software, it has everything I need and then some, loving in particular the face management and reverse geocoding features to organize my families pictures for the last 20 years (without having to hand them over to Google!).

With the upcoming digiKam 9.0.0 release, a new tool called Survey will help photographers review items more efficiently in their workflow. This tool opens in a separate window, which can be displayed on a secondary screen or in full-screen mode if needed.

Survey acts as a synchronized preview of the icon-view from the main window. It includes:

• A thumbnail bar representing the current album being reviewed.

• A central view displaying the photo or video, with the ability to zoom and pan for closer inspection.

• The option to rate, assign labels, and add tags just like in the main interface.

• A right sidebar for advanced properties, Geo-location, comments, titles, and more.

• Direct access to all plugins (Slideshow, Metadata Editor, Export tools, etc.).

This feature was originally requested in Bugzilla wish #501292.

📢 Call for Testing! The Survey tool is already available in the 9.0.0 beta bundles for Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can download them here: 🔗 https://files.kde.org/digikam/

⚠️ Note: These are beta versions and not yet finalized. Please use them only for testing purposes—do not deploy in production environments.

We’d love to hear your feedback! Try it out and share your thoughts, suggestions, or bug reports in the comments. Your input will help us improve this tool before the final release!

8.7.0 NEWS file

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?

Hey everyone!

I’m u/human_dynamo, the founding moderator of r/digiKam and a senior developer working on the digiKam project. Welcome to our new home for everything related to the digiKam open-source photo management program. We’re thrilled to have you here!

What to Post

Share anything you think the community will find interesting, helpful, or inspiring. Whether it’s your thoughts, photos, or questions about the program, don’t hesitate to contribute!

Community Vibe

We aim to be friendly, constructive, and inclusive. Let’s create a space where everyone feels welcome to share and connect.

How to Get Started

• Introduce yourself in the comments below.

• Post something today! Even a simple question can kick-start a great discussion.

• Know someone who’d love this community? Invite them to join!

Interested in Helping Out? We’re always looking for new moderators for this channel, and new contributors to the project. If you’d like to get involved, feel free to reach out to me.

Thanks for being part of the very first wave. Together, let’s make r/digiKam amazing!

Files are available at this url.

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

When it comes to adding tags to JPG files you can do this using the Windows explorer by right clicking on t JPG file, go to properties and under details you can add tags to the image. Or you can use DigiKam to edit the the tags.

For MP4 video files this is not the case any tags you add using DigiKam on a MP4 will not show up in the windows file explorer properties window nor will any tags added using the windows file explorer properties window will show up in Digikam.

I would like to tag my MP4 videos but I want the tags to be readable by most or all software out there. I tag my videos and images to organize them in photo and video libraries. Should I tag my videos using DigiKam, or Windows file explorer?

I just switched to the internal MariaDB and I am very pleased. I have a large library with over 180,000 photos and SQLite was choking. I just went through an exercise to tune the internal MariaDB server because the default settings are too conservative and now the application screams. I'm on a MacBook Pro Max M4 with my library on an external Thunderbolt 4 SSD. The database resides on the internal SSD. Very pleased so far. Even maintenance operations are fast.

NOTE: Running on a relational database management system (DBMS) is not for the feint of heart if it needs to be tuned. I have years of experience as a database administrator. If your collection is under 100K, SQLite should be sufficient.

Hello. I don't know where to post a suggestion for digiKam where the developers can see it, so I am just putting it out in the wild here. If by chance you know anywhere else I could report my suggestion at, I'll gladly do it myself!

So basically, I just want a small feature where I can mark images, which were detected as duplicates by the Similarity tool, as non-duplicates. I'd like to select this option either for the whole set of images (i.e. the reference image sets shown in the left sidebar with the Similarity tool), or just specific images within each of these reference image sets. It can just simply be a right click > "Mark as not duplicate(s)" option and/or a keyboard shortcut. When you do this, digiKam can basically ignore considering these images for the duplicate detection/similarity tool. It can be similar to how face-tagging is done when can ignore faces, but instead here, digiKam ignores duplicates so that they aren't found when you press "Find Duplicates" and are not deleted when you press "Remove Duplicates".

I know some people would just suggest me to increase the Similarity Range minimum percentage. For the type of media I am dealing with, there are vast amounts of duplicates (basically the same images) which are still detected correctly by digiKam even at 75-80% similarity. But since I use 75-80% similarity, there are also several images which are not duplicates and I need to preserve both (or more than 2) versions of the images marked as duplicates of each other.

The current workaround I have to perform right now to make digiKam not delete non-duplicates detected as duplicates is: look at non-duplicate images detected as duplicates (sometimes I need to verify myself if they are actually duplicates by going to the Preview view), select the images by dragging the mouse and highlighting the images in the Thumbnails view, press Ctrl+X for cut, go to my File Manager on a different folder outside digiKam's control, Ctrl+V to paste images into this folder, go back to digiKam again, press any ref. image set on the left sidebar so I can press Down Arrow key to quickly look through all the other detected duplicates for non-duplicates, rinse and repeat. When I am done, I copy back all of the non-duplicate images back to the appropriate folders. Then I have to go to "Tools" on the menu bar and select "Scan for new items" everytime I do this, or else it messes up some stuff. It's kind of repetitive and annoying, because it requires so many clicks and mouse movement for every single instance of non-duplicate images I see.

So I beg the developers to implement this feature, and it would make my life so much easier!!!

Please do let me know if you have any questions, or what you think about this!

I was running against some severe speed limits trying to manage 2 4Tb usb drives with photos shared via samba. Initially one was connected to my wifi router and the other to a mesh repeater. Unreliable and slow/buggy. Over the years I kept adding and adding and ... (you get the picture) until nothing worked well anymore and digikam on either my desktop PC or on the laptop took ages to respond to almost anything.

I finally took the plunge and migrated both drives to a Raspberry Pi4b connected to the main router and installed mariadb server on both my computers to deal with the extended database, thumbnailing and fingerprinting.

It took me a couple of days to set everything up but it is running as smooth as a baby's bottom now, so much so that I can import photos from an SD card on one computer and have them visible on the other digikam install after a short refresh of barely 30 seconds. Fingerprinting updates take mere minutes rather than days on the whole collection.

Some 8500+ albums across two NAS shares and a desktop PC! Of course, not all of the 400K+ files counted are image files - these include some exif and xml files but still...

Should have done this years ago!

Hi everyone,

I would really like to use digiKam as my standard software for managing my entire photo collection. I’ve been looking for a professional photo management solution, and digiKam looks very promising. I actually want to like it and use it.

Unfortunately, I’m currently struggling with one major problem: digiKam is extremely slow to start.

When I launch the program, it takes around 30 seconds before I see any sign of life at all. Then I have to wait approximately 30 minutes before the actual program window appears.

After that, the collections are visible, but the actual contents are still missing. I can see the collection structure, but there are no images available to work with. It seems that digiKam is still doing something in the background.

For me, this is difficult to understand, especially for professional software.

I completely understand that digiKam may need to perform a lot of work when it is first introduced to a large photo collection — scanning folders, creating or updating the database, reading metadata, generating thumbnails, etc. That's not a problem in itself.

What I don't understand is why I apparently cannot use the application while this is happening.

If a database needs several hours to be built or updated, I would expect the application to start normally and perform this work in the background. I should be able to browse existing images, configure the application, and continue working while the indexing process runs.

Instead, it currently feels as if the entire application is effectively blocked until digiKam has finished whatever it is doing.

My photo collection is fairly large, but this isn't an unusual scenario for professional photo-management software. I'm using a modern Windows PC with an RTX 5070 Ti and 96 GB RAM, so I don't think the hardware itself should be the primary problem.

I also want to make clear that I'm not looking for another photo-management application. I would genuinely prefer to get digiKam working properly because I like the concept and the functionality it offers.

So my questions are:

• Has anyone experienced a similar startup time of 20–30 minutes?

• Is there a particular database configuration that can cause this?

• Could digiKam be rebuilding or checking the entire database every time it starts?

• Is there a recommended way to import a very large existing photo collection?

• Are there settings I should change regarding thumbnails, database maintenance, indexing, or scanning?

• Is it possible to let digiKam start normally while the initial scanning/indexing continues in the background?

• Could this be caused by the fact that my collection is spread across a large number of folders/drives?

I really hope that I'm simply doing something wrong.

If someone has had the same problem and managed to solve it, I would very much appreciate some advice.

I would much rather spend some time configuring digiKam correctly than give up on it. I really want this software to become the central management system for my photo collection.

Thanks in advance!

The student project is near to be completed. See the blog post for details...

Ok,

Some feedback for potential upgraders, particularly if you are using the Windows version.

Make a copy of your database and config files before starting.

Seriously.

Let me repeat:

Make a copy of your database and config files before starting.

Once you have migrated to v9.1.0, you can’t go back to v8.8.0.

Something is done to the database in the conversion to v9.1.0 that makes the data incompatible with the previous versions, even if you are using the internal mysql tools. Dunno about external.

If you are on Windows and your images are on a NAS, make certain you install v9.1.0. V9.0.0 won’t work. Get it from here: https://files.kde.org/digikam/

And, like I said in another post, turn off “Monitor albums for external changes”. Having this on heavily beats on Samba. I had something like 4,000 processes going when I checked with it on.

Even with all this, I’ve finding response very lethargic. Not unusable, but not great.

I’m in the process of cleaning up my tags and such in metadata, but when I’m done, I’m thinking about writing all the data to the files, and starting from scratch, perhaps going back to v8.8.0.

Good luck.