KGeoTag 1.6.0 released
I'm happy to announce the new release of KGeoTag, the KDE/Linux Photo Geotagging Program! There are a few changes and updates:
Coordinates format is now configurable
When I wrote KGeoTag back then, I spared not a single thought on how to order or format geographic coordinates. I thought one would do that like in a cartesian coordinate system: First X, then Y. So: First the “X-ish” longitude, then the “Y-ish” latitude. One never stops to learn: It actually seems to be common practise to first put the latitude, and the longitude afterwards. But it seems like there’s no real “official convention” or “best practise” about this.
Long story short: Everyone can now choose their preferred “coordinates flavor”. One can either select “Latitude Longitude” or “Longitude Latitude”. On top of that, one now can also select how the respective coordinates should be displayed: As decimal degrees (like 50.321373° N), degrees and decimal minutes (like 50° 19,2824' N) or degrees, minutes and decimal seconds (like 50° 19' 16,94" N). All “coordinate flavors” display a reasonable amount of decimal places so that the precision is better than 1 m at the equator. However, the cardinal directions are always added, so that it’s always clear what’s going on.
Additionally, coordinates can now be copied to the clipboard, either using the map’s context menu or the coordinates display below the map. The context menu can now also be used to add bookmarks.
Other changes
- It’s now possible to (re-)assign all currently selected images to the current map center using a keyboard shortcut. Optionally, you can also have the next untagged image selected automatically afterwards. Thanks to Robert Menger for the respective feature request :-)
- Updated the timezones data files to 2024b (cf. Timezone Boundary Builder’s Release Announcement).
- Fixed a crash when removing a GPX track and moving the “track walker” slider afterwards. Whilst doing so, also fixed the track points counting for slider when removing a GPX track and loading another one directly afterwards.
- Changes to the image list layout (combined/separate) are now displayed correctly (again).
- The window state saved by the KXmlGuiWindow/KMainWindow class is now used to restore the dock arrangement (or setup the default one) instead of saving the saveState() twice, only using a different serialization. Also, the last window position is now restored correctly when closing the program and opening it again.
- Closed floating docks are now properly restored by using “Set default dock arrangement”. This addresses bug #488597, but actually, it’s an upstream Qt bug (reported as bug #126418), as the docks shouldn’t be closable at all in the first place.
A note to the distributors
- It should now be possible (again) to build KGeoTag on Ubuntu LTS 20.04 (the latest still-supported LTS version).
- The key used for signing the release has been updated. All PGP keys used to sign KDE software releases can be found in the sysadmin/release-keyring repo. My currently used key can also be found there, cf. tleupold@key2.asc.
… and what about Qt 6?!
This is another Qt5/KF5 release. The reason is quite simple: Marble, the backend that is used to display the map, has not yet been ported to Qt6/KF6.
I wrote about this to the KDE Dev Mailing List. Fortuantely, this seemed to have set some action in motion (or maybe my recent in-person nagging at Akademy Würzburg?! ;-). At least, there’s currently a (not released yet) buildable and working Qt 6 branch of Marble.
As soon as there’s an official Qt6/KF6 release of Marble, porting KGeoTag should be a no-brainer. And I’m pretty sure it will also be possible to support both Qt 5 and 6 for the forseeable future. So as soon as Qt 6 Marble is out, I’ll strive to do a Qt 6 KGeoTag release as fast as possible.
Have a lot of fun geotagging your photos with the new release of KGeoTag :-)