Fwd: Sidecars & .xmp files

[Remco Viëtor]

On vendredi 26 avril 2024 16:02:09 CEST Nadine Helkenn wrote:
(...)
> My workflow is such that I have created an album where I bring in new images
> (from my phone, digital camera (via memory card), or scanned with a
> dedicated scanner) that I want to process with additional information
> before I move them to their respective albums (generally chronological
> yyyy-mm-dd). So now this new-images album has a whole bunch of .xmp files
> left behind after the images have been processed & moved. Am I supposed to
> do anything with them? Shouldn’t they be moved with their respective image
> files? Should I manually move them with file explorer? Can I just delete
> them (would I lose the edits they contain)? I am extremely confused!

If you use Digikam to organise your images, you should move images from within 
digikam. Digikam "knows" that sidecars belong to an image, and should make 
sure they are moved together. An external file manager has no way to "know" 
some files should be moved together, so will leave the sidecars behind when 
you move image files around. 

What to do with the orphaned sidecars depends on your digikam settings, the 
file type of the image files, and what exactly you have done during and after 
moving the files. So it's hard to give advice.

If you moved the files with an external file manager (file explorer), and 
haven't imported them back into digikam yet, you could move the sidecars to 
where you placed the corresponging image files. Then, when you re-import into 
digikam, it will pick up the sidecars.
If you have re-imported the files back into digikam (perhaps via an automatic 
scan for new 

Have you noticed any missing data from the files you moved? If not, deleting 
the orphaned sidecars should be safe (the sidecar is a copy of the information 
in the database). That's usually the case for scanned files (.png or .tiff) 
and .jpg files.

Remco