They select GitLab platform for technical reasons. One year ago, KDE team start to search a collaboration with a major developpement Web service to increase the visibility and the accessibility for new contributors to the infrastructure hosting open-source projects. We use Git repositories to host source code, Bugzilla to manage reports, Phabricator for pull-requests, and Jenkins for the continuous integration, deployment, and static analysis. Historically, digiKam has always used the KDE infrastructures to manage the project.
It needs more time to write code in goal to use whole exported digiKam API with code examples. This project have been voluntary separated of digiKam, and still under development. Source codes of few HelloWorld plugins are available to help future external contributors to write new tools for digiKam and Showfoto. On GitHub, a new project have been started recently to host a collection of plugins dedicated to document and test the architecture. If you don’t know yet G’MIC, we recommend highly to take a look to this review published on a blog one year ago. G’MIC is one of the most popular Gimp plugins, which is now also available officially for digiKam and Showfoto. The interface provides a preview and setting sliders for each filter. It contains several hundred filters written in the G’MIC language, dynamically updated through an internet feed. G’MIC comes with a Qt-based graphical interface named GMic-Qt, which may be already integrated as a Gimp or Krita plugin. More complex macros and pipelines built out of those commands are defined in its library files. G’MIC offers many built-in commands for image post-processing, including basic mathematical manipulations, look up tables, and filtering operations. This tool based on GMic library, a processing engine known for its noise removal filters, came from an earlier project called GREYCstoration. With this release, a first official external tool have been ported to digiKam plugin architecture: GMic-Qt. Since digiKam 6.1.0, we open digiKam to external contributions with a collection of new plugin interfaces, named “Generic” for album items processing and export to web-services, “Editor” to extend Image Editor and Showfoto post processing, and “Bqm” to add new tools in Batch Queue Manager.
We are now proud to briefly announce the new digiKam 6.3.0, a maintenance version which consolidates this feedback and acts as an important phase of this 3-year-old project. We received a lot of excellent user feedback after publishing the third digiKam 6 release in August 2019.