[Digikam-users] Technical newbie questions

[Duncan Hill]

Henning Spruth wrote:
> 1. In essence, digikam manages image files in a directory structure under 
> its "Album Library Path".

Correct.

> 2. An album is identical to a directory below the album library path. Any 
> change to the album hierarchy in digikam is directly reflected to a change in 
> directory structure.

Yes, but don't change the structure outside of digikam.  The properties, 
tags etc are based on file path, so moving them without digikam doing it 
means that the image counts as a 'deleted' image, and it then picked up 
new.  There's a bugs.kde.org entry on solving this.

> 3. When adding images or importing folders, the images are copied into the 
> album library path.

Pretty much.

> 4. A central function of digikam is to maintain an index of the files in the 
> album library and the image properties (tags etc.) in its sqlite database.

Pretty much.  There's also the showfoto application (part of the 
package) that does image manipulation.

> 5. Thumbnails for the album view are not stored on disk, but always generated 
> on the fly.

IIRC, digiKam uses the KDE thumbnail system, which caches thumbnails 
based on md5 signature or md5 digest of name or similar.

> 6. When setting the "album library path" to an existing directory structure 
> containing images in a hierarchy, it will scan the structure and recognize 
> the existing levels as albums. It will not modify the directory structure 
> except for creating a digikam3.db at its root.

Pretty much.