A new version of Qt photo management tool ‘digiKam is now available and it features massively improved face detection.
The team behind the open-source app say the new neural network model used in release “can detect blurred faces, covered faces, profiles of faces, printed faces, faces turned away, partial faces, etc”
Which is pretty impressive if a little creepy — hey, I watched a lot of cyberpunk movies as a kid 😉.
DigiKam 7.0’s redux facial recognition even works on animals too:
For the face tagging feature to work you do have to explicitly tag a couple of images yourself, ideally of ones featuring the same face so the neural network has something to compare photos too.
This means if you do not want to face detection run on your photos at all you can choose not to use it; it’s opt-in and not automatic.
With better face detection comes better face detection management — or it will do in time. DigiKam devs are working on advanced features like being able reject matches, override matches, ignore specific faces, sort people based on similarity (a bit weird) and more.
Face tagging aside Digikam 7.0 also features a couple of other notable improvements.
A new “ImageMosaicWall” tool (apparently) you create an image mosaic made up using a bunch of other images. I say “apparently” as every time I tried to use this feature to re-create a photo of my cat using a folder full of omg! screenshots …the app crashed 💁🏻♂️.
There are also new options relating to adding location metadata added to photos (and extracting it from others); a shuffle option in the slideshow; and easy generation of responsive HTML image galleries; and better support for HEIF images.
Last, but by no means, least is a raft of improve camera compatibility, with RAW support for additional 40 camera — this takes in new models from the likes of Canon, Sony, Panasonic, GoPro, and even DJI’s Mavic Air drone and Osmo action cam.
DigiKam now supports RAW images from over 1,000 different cameras — no mean feat given the lack of standardisation around the format.
Download DigiKam 7.0
You can download DigiKam for Windows, macOS and Linux from the KDE website. The app is also available on Flathub, if that’s your bag.
Want get up and running with Digikam without going through the hassle of installing? Download the DigiKam 7.0 AppImage.
AppImages are standalone run-times which contain all relevant dependencies bundled up inside. It will work on pretty much every modern Linux distro, including recently outdated ones like Ubuntu 19.10, which is where I tried it!