[Digikam-users] F-Spot --> Digikam

[Andy Choens]

Well, after using Ubuntu/Gnome for years, I randomly installed Kubuntu on my 
laptop and digikam is one of the main reasons I decided to leave GNOME. 
Digikam's speed and feature set are IMPRESSIVE.

Unfortunately, I have many, many (several thousand) photos in my f-spot 
database. I would really like to move this information into digikam. Oddly, 
F-Spot claims to store it's information in the photo, but digikam can't find 
the tags. 

Then I started googling and discovered an old thread hear that explained why.

This bummed me out, but it hasn't stopped me, yet. I started looking at the 
digikam and f-spot sqlite databases. I would like to try moving my tags from 
the f-spot db to the digikam db. This seems to be easier said than done. For 
starters, F-Spot is still using sqlite2 while digikam is using sqlite3. I 
thought I would be able to use a program like datakiosk to move the data 
over, but I can't get it to open digikam's database.

So, I went command-line, and started looking at the dbs. Here's what I found.
_______________________________________________________________________
F-Spot Database
 To save 99% of my info, I really only need to interface with 3 tables.
 
Table Name		Table Columns
 photos			id, time, directory_path, name, description, default version
 tags			id, name, category_id, is_category, sort_priority, icon
 photo tags		photo_id, tag_id
_______________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________
Digikam Database
Obviously, I have to move the info into this db. I'm sure the layout of this 
file is well know to everyone here, but I'll lay it out anyway. I think I 
really only need to interact with 3 tables here.
 
Table Name		Table Columns
 Images			id, name, dirid, caption, datetime
 Tags			id, pid, name, icon, iconkde
 ImageTags		imageid, tagid
_______________________________________________________________________

Unfortunately, neither db uses the photos actual name as it's internal id. I 
understand why this is done this way (it has to be), but it doesn't make my 
life any easier. Because the 2 programs index the files in a different order, 
digikam's id # is different from f-spot's id #. This complicates my life.
 
 I can easily query the f-spot db to give me a list of photos (actual file 
name or internal id #) in each tag. I would like to import these lists into 
digikam's db. I can see how to do this by hand, but I'm not sure how I can 
script this to happen. If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them.

Thanks
--andy