Scribbles and Snaps

Good news for those who want to run the latest version of digiKam on Windows. The  SourceForge repository now has a Windows installer of the latest digiKam version courtesy of Ananta Palani.

I tested the installer with a Windows 7 machine, it worked like a charm. While the installer makes it supremely easy to deploy digiKam on Windows, the application does have a few quirks. Most notably, the Windows version of digiKam cannot import photos directly from storage media or cameras, so you need to copy them to the hard disk using Windows’ own built-in image transfer tool, and then add the transferred photos to digiKam. The Trash feature doesn’t work either, but you can work around this issue by deleting photos instead of sending them to the trash. To be fair, though, these issues are not caused by digiKam itself, but are due to bugs in the underlying KDE libraries which the application relies on.

If you want to install digiKam on Windows, you have two options: you can either compile the application from the source code or you can use the KDE Windows installer. The latter approach is by far the easiest one, but there is a drawback: the installer usually includes an older version of digiKam. If you can live with that, and you don’t feel like getting your hands dirty with compiling digiKam from the source, then the KDE installer is the way to go.

First off, create a new KDE directory on your hard disk, grab then the KDE installer from the KDE on Windows project’s Web site, and move it into the created directory. Launch the installer, select the Install from Internet option, and press Next.

In the Installation Directory field, enter the path to the KDE directory, and press Next. Select the End User option in the Install Mode section, and MSVC 32Bit from the Compiler Mode section.

Keep the settings in the next several screens at their defaults. When you reach the Download Server Settings screen, choose the www.winkde.org server, since it offers the newest as well as older versions of the KDE bundle. Press Next and find the version of KDE that contains the digiKam and kipi-plugins packages. Select then both packages, and press Next. Hit the Next button once again, and the installer does the rest. Wait till the installer has finished downloading and installing the software, press the Finish button, and you are done. Now you can launch and use digiKam as any other Windows application.