You don’t need to be a professional photographer (protographer?) to find photo management software like digiKam helpful, and the latest release includes several features regular folks are sure to find a use for.
Note: this is a news item covering what’s new in the digiKam 8.7.0 specifically. It is not an introduction, recap, or guide to everything this app can do (i.e., import, manage, tag, edit and share photos, images and RAW files).
The new digiKam 8.7.0 release brings several new features, settings and fixes to the fore, and the bulk of them focus on adding to the software’s growing array of algorithmically-assistive tools.
There’s a new plugin for AI-aided image rotation, and further refinement to the “AI” face recognition feature that underwent a major rewrite in the digiKam 8.6.0 release earlier this year.
Not sure if your device will is able to handle “AI” features? This update offers a way to check your GPU’s AI capabilities so you can find out.
digiKam 8.7.0: What’s New?
AI Face Recognition Improved
In digiKam 8.7.0 it’s possible to “configure the face recognition scan to automatically start a new face recognition when new faces are confirmed or tagged”, devs say. Users can enable this in the new version via the Settings > Miscellaneous > Behaviour > Background panel.
AI face matching isn’t perfect so face matches aren’t always on the nose (so to speak). To address this and improve precision (and wasted effort), digiKam now saves rejected face matches (to learn) and presents the next best match (if there is one).
Additionally, digiKam’s developers say they’ve tweaked the algorithms that power the software’s facial recognition features to “improve performance and accuracy.” If you tried an earlier release and found it sluggish, upgrading to the latest may help.
AI GPU Testing Available
The digiKam 8.7.0 update introduces an AI GPU test so users can check “the availability of GPU processing with the Artificial Intelligence pipelines”. This can be accessed from the Settings > Miscellaneous > Behaviour > System panel.
The test will “check if your system is able to use GPU acceleration when running the AI models by validating Open and OpenCL have the required libraries and drivers installed”.
As digiKam is designed to make use of the GPU to speed up processes like face recognition and image analysis, knowing what a GPU does and doesn’t support can help discern why the app’s performance might be (drastically) affected when using certain features.
New AI Auto-Rotate Plugin
digiKam 8.7.0 includes new image rotation plugin that (you guessed it) uses AI to mediate away the menial, manual approach. This is handy when scanning old photos or batch importing images that weren’t all taken in the correct orientation.
While the Batch Queue Manager in digiKam has long had an option to auto-rotate images in import, it requires manual input initially and works on the assumption that all images within the workflow of the same orientation need to be rotated the same way.
Thus, this version of the open source photo manager ships with a new plugin that is “designed to automate orientation detection through content analysis using a deep learning engine”, i.e., to automatically rotate images to the (assumed) correct direction.
As with other “AI” tools, the results can be hit and miss, depending on the content of the shots. You may find you spend more time correcting its errors than you would have spent doing the adjustments manually for yourself!
Other Changes
Beyond the AI enhancements, this release includes technical updates too:
- 241 bug fixes
- Libraw updated v2025-05-12 snapshot
- ExifTool updated v13.29
- G’MIC-Qt plugin v3.5.0
- Qt framework update: v6.8.3 Windows & Linux; 6.9.0 macOS
The team says it is exploring the integration of ‘deep neural networks for automatic tasks’, such as noise reduction and colour adjustments and investigating whether an LLM can provide natural language database searching.
Download digiKam 8.7.0
More details in the blog announcement, where you’ll find links to download digiKam for Windows, macOS and Linux (official AppImage provided). Official digiKam snap and Flatpak builds are available, but not updated to 8.7.0 at the time of writing.