The digiKam developers have released version 1.2.0 of their open source advanced digital photo management application and Kipi plug-ins for digiKam

DigiKam is an advanced digital photo management application. The new version brings new Remove Doubles feature and a lot of bug fixes

The new version of free and open source photo management app brings lots of new features. For example: metadata tags filtering can be customized, metadata templates, batch queue manager, first run assistant, database statistics dialog, support for wavelets image file format PGF, OpenStreetMap support in Geolocation panels, new color management...

Photographers in the Free world rejoice! On behalf of the Digikam developer team, Gilles Caullier has announced the first KDE 4 release of Digikam, the photo management application.

This version of free and open source photo management suite features long awaited face detection and recognition, image versioning support, XMP metadata sidecar files support, big improvements in tagging and marking photos, reversed geo-tagging and many other improvements, including a total of 236 fixed bugs. Close companion Kipi-plugins is released along with digiKam 2.0.0.

Reviewer's verdict: I think digiKam is the best open source photo management tool out there. It's robust, powerful and best of all, it has API interface (which I have yet to try!). There also exists a more user-friendly interface, Showfoto - which most users will find very attractive.

Using digiKam's Kipi plugins, you can upload your photos to a variety of popular photo services, including Flickr, Picasaweb, and SmugMug. But what if you want to host your own photo album and still be able to populate it with photos directly from within digiKam?

Last week we learned how to sanely organize our vast digital photo archives with Digikam. Today we'll look at Digikam's built-in editing tools. You'll be able to do a surprising amount of your editing work without ever leaving Digikam.

Shutterbugs have found big power in understanding and manipulating digital photos in RAW formats. Linux lovers have the perfect tool for harnessing the RAW power in Digikam, via the built-in LibRaw. Want to claim the power for your own photo efforts? Read on and I'll show you how to tame RAW photos on Linux with Digikam.