Today we, and we is in this case the digiKam crew, announced the second beta of digiKam 0.7.3. In a seperate branch we are really working hard at digiKam 0.8.

One of the difficulties we faced untill now is that we worked on the actual files on the disk, so when we want to sort on the exif-date of the images, it was really slow, we could not put that function into digiKam, which was really bad.

So we decided to work on that. Also we had the problem that having the albums and the tags on the left made it really difficult to navigate, tag, scroll back to the album on top, scroll back to the tags, etc.

Ok, before I continue, let me insert a screenie to show what we have now in that branch.

click to enlarge

On the left we have implemented a navigation bar, this way you can easily navigate between the tags, albums and dates. Dates? Yes dates. It shows all images in the period you select. Good to get things in the right perspective again ;-)

We can now sort images based on exif-date. We store all dates in a database. This way we can display them really fast, but the challenge is to keep the database in sync with the items on disk.

But the branch is experimental. Things are not stable and far from finished, but I wanted to show you what we are working on. It is really great to work on and I can learn c++ in a very nice way ;-)

Renchi has made some more screenies here and here.And on this one you can see a custom date picker on the lower left corner. You c