[Digikam-devel] 0.8.0-beta1 release announcement.

[Renchi Raju]

Release announcement attached:

The digiKam team is pleased to bring to you the next generation
of the user-friendly digital photo management software and its 
image plugins. The primary focus for this release is new ways
of photo organization and searching. This release is the result of 
4 months of development and we hope it will be as much fun for 
you to use it as we had developing it.

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The noteworthy features in this release:

* NEW USER INTERFACE: Albums and Tags have been separated out into
  different views and these views are collapsible.
* PHOTO DATES AND COMMENTS: Photos are now scanned for their
  metadata which is then stored in the database. The EXIF 
  timestamp (if available) is used for sorting and searching.
* DATE BASED VIRTUAL FOLDERS: Each corresponding to the month in 
  which the pictures were taken. Its also possible to filter this 
  view to show photos from single or multiple day(s) and week(s)
* SEARCHING: Two interfaces have been implemented for searching
  on photos:
  - QUICK SEARCH: a keyword based search which also allows 
    date based lookups
  - ADVANCED SEARCH: build rules and groups of rules to do 
    very precise searches.
  - LIVE FEEDBACK: Both searches show instant results based on 
    the current search criteria
* SEARCH BASED VIRTUAL FOLDERS: The searches can be saved as 
  virtual folders and its possible to edit the search criterion
  later.
* TAG FILTERING: A new view has been added to the right side 
  which allows quick drag and drop tag assignments and also
  filtering of photos in the current view. This view is again
  collapsible
* ALBUM LOCATION INDICATOR: When photos are shown from a virtual
  folder (tag, date or search), the photos are grouped together
  based on album locations.
* MEMORY OPTIMIZATION: Thumbnails are now loaded on demand
  and only a fixed cache of thumbnails is kept in memory
* NEW THEMES: Dark, Sandy and Orange Crush
* BACKEND CHANGES:
  - Database upgraded to sqlite3
  - New kioslaves for handling date, search, tag, album listing
* SHOWFOTO : new slide show tool
* IMAGE PLUGIN CHANGES :
 - Plugin dialogs have been revamped for better usability 
   and easier comparison of filter effects.
 - Plugin computations are now threaded
 - Plugin preview is now resizable.
 - BigEndian fixes.
* NEW IMAGE PLUGIN FEATURES :
 - Aspect Ratio Crop : new photograph composition guide tool based 
   on Fibonacci series (golden mean).
 - New Color AutoCorrection tool with preview 
   (Normalize, Autolevels, Equalize, and Stretch Contrast).
 - Free Rotation : Auto crop and antialiasing options.
 - Shear Tool : Antialiasing option.
* NEW IMAGE PLUGINS :
 - Refocus : An advanced sharpness editor
 - HotPixels : An hot pixels removal tool to fix bad pixels from 
   camera CCD.

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Further information about digiKam and digiKamImagePlugins is 
available from the following websites:

http://www.digikam.org
http://extragear.kde.org/apps/digikamimageplugins