[Digikam-devel] Digikam and XMP sidecard

[Gilles Caulier]

2009/12/5 Bruno Metz <bruno.stpete at yahoo.com>:
> Hello,
>
> My name is Bruno, i am a French expert photographer with almost 50 000 RAW
> pictures taking during 8 years. It represent almost 150Go. I am currently
> willing to move from my current windows / lighthroom configuration to Ubuntu
> / Digikam solution
>
> During the importation process, the RAW files are readed properly. It seems
> that the XMP cards for those file are not imported during the process. i
> tried to find some ways to do it but could not find any on the web. Could
> you help me on this ?

Yes, currently XMP sidecar are ignored. It must be fixed in the
future. There is a file in bugzilla about. It's not very complicated
to do ...

Exiv2 0.18.2 library is able to handle XMP sidecar has well. This lib
is used by digiKam to play with metadata. If Raw files and sidecars
are at the same place, and use the same file name (as foo.nef /
foo.xmp), it will be easy to read both file at the same time during
import.

>
> More generaly, as i am having the RAW files, i need to work with the
> sidecard concept. Assuming that the previous action can be done or after
> having keyed in some data directly with DigiKam, is there therefore a
> solution to export the data to new XMP sidecard ? if yes, i am forseeing a
> potential issue about how to merge/compile the info when a previous sidecard
> is already here.

Not yet. XMP sidecar concept have been dropped for the moment. There
is also a file in bugzilla about...

>
> Last question, is there a way to go into a non-destructive solution when
> transforming the file from RAW to JPEG ? i find this option really
> interesting as it allows to change/update any crop/color/etc... process
> applied to the pictures easy to readjust when needed.

We have talking about a little at previous coding sprint, and it's
planed to do after 1.0.0 release.

>
> Note that i would be happy to discsuss further on these topics and been part
> of your developement team if you need someone with a more user/photographer
> view.

Yes, you is welcome. Thanks for the feedback.

Best

Gilles Caulier