KDE’s GSoC 2023 Plans Include New Digikam, Kalendar & Krita Features

A swathe of well-known free software projects are taking part in this year’s Google Summer of Code, and KDE is among them.

It will mentor 9 efforts as part of the annual GSoC event, which was created in 2005 as a way help encourage and attract new contributors to open source projects. After all, contributors are the life-blood for many FOSS projects.

So what sort of things are on the horizon?

The list of approved initiatives is now up. A canny crop of KDE software is set to benefit the year, including photo editor Digikam, productivity aid Kalendar, Okular document viewer, creative powerhouse Krita, and (a regular on this site) the Tokodon Mastodon client.

Exactly

KDE GSoC 2023 Projects

image credit: KDE

Well, Kalendar stands to gain 3 interesting new features.

The first is mail integration. The idea behind this, according to KDE dev Benson Muite, is to “make it possible to use Kalendar as a full featured email client integrated with the already existing calendar and address book features” — intriguing stuff!

The second is to add “availability” features to Kalendar. This will enable users to specify the working hours they are available for meetings and events.

The third is allowing Kalendar to send invitations to other users for custom events, and handle accepting or declining of incoming calendar invitations from other users.

Editing Krita Resource bundles (image: KDE)

Elsewhere, there’s effort going into a Krita Resource Bundle Creator (including the ability to edit existing bundles); adding Mastodon admin APIs to allow Tokodon to work as a client for instance moderators and admins; and improving font rendering in Okular for Android.

Also looking in good stead is Digikam. Students are going to “develop a deep learning model that can accurately recognize various categories of objects in digital photos, and generate corresponding keywords that can be automatically assigned” — neat, huh?

Alongside this, another student will work on using machine-learning to improve Items Properties Management in digiKam. It’s hoped this will “introduce a more seamless and efficient approach” when applying tags to multiple images.

Want more details on each project? Check out the KDE Community page on the official Google Summer of Code 2023 website to find all the info and links you need.