Installing a package from a particular source using synaptic

Digikam seems to be the only photo management application available in Ubuntu that deals well with photos that contain gps-coordinates in the associated Exif metadata.

Unfortunately, the digikam 3.5.0 version that is installed from the default repository, is all but unusable due to frequent crashes. Fortunately, there is an external repository that contains a more recent version (namely 4.12.0 at the time of this writing) of digikam.

So I followed the instructions from this Tips on Ubuntu page to add the repository to my list of software sources and install the new version of digikam:

# add software source
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:philip5/extra
# update local package database with contents of new source
sudo apt-get update
# install new version of digikam
sudo apt-get install digikam

To my dismay, the old 3.5.0 version got installed again. This is understandable because there are now two packages with identical names ('digikam') available.

Rather than search the web for a solution, I tried my luck with Synaptic and, indeed, it turned out that there was a button to restrict the 'origin' of the packages (see the lower left corner on the image below).

Synaptic restricted to a particular repository

Selecting the digikam packages and hitting 'Apply' did indeed install the coveted 4.12.0 version.

While the above method is simple, there are alternatives, as described in this Askubuntu page. In particular, the -t option for apt-get is relevant and interesting (but harder to remember than 'just use synaptic').