[Digikam-users] How to "integrate" digikam and gimp?

[Arnd Baecker]

Hi Gerlos,

On Fri, 17 Oct 2008, Gerlando wrote:

> Hello everyone!
> I'm not sure if this is the right place to put this question, but I'm
> sure you can give me useful hints!
> I use Digikam 0.9.3 to manage my large (and always growing!) collection
> on photos, I use a lot comments and I find very useful tags and "stars"
> to organize my photos, and I use Gimp to edit them and to do things that
> Digikam (so far) can't do.
>
> The problem is when I open a photo with Gimp, I edit it, and save a
> copy: my copy is without any metadata, and I have to search it, and add
> manually comments, tags and stars.
> I'd like to find an easy way to copy metadata from the old version to
> the new one.

There are a couple of issues here
- only recent versions of gimp load/save the exif info of images,
  as far as I know.
  (this can be easily tested outside of digikam by running
     exiv2 pt original.jpg
     gimp original.jpg
     # save as mod.jpg
     exiv2 pt mod.jpg
  For me exif info is kept with gimp 2.4.5
- If comments, tags, rating have been made within digikam
  and not written to the image itself, these will not be
  transferred to the modified image,
  as they are just kept in digikam's database.
  For this see wish:
  https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155384

> Yes, it would be fantastic if it would be automatic, just like when I
> edit and save a copy using Digikam editor, but I understand that maybe
> it isn't easy to do! (it depends on digikam and gimp...)

Well, I think the main problem is that a priori there is no
way for digikam to know under which name you will store an
edited file.
So for digikam, the file saved via gimp will appear
as a new file.
One could try to do some guessing, based on the metadata
(i.e. date/time of the image and some other infos).
This might even work fine in 99% of the cases, but
somehow I have the feeling that there can be situations
where things can get screwed up.

See also the discussion in
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=129523

 > Installing kipi-plugins I've found a submenu with some commands to
> import metadata, but I couldn't find nothing to export it!
> It would be nice to have a couple of buttons, or something in the
> right-click menu to copy and paste metadata!

You could simulate something like this by
adding a script to the "Open with" right-click menu,
which uses the current file, extracts the metadata
using exif and puts the output into the X11 buffer using
wxcopy/wxpaste. (Note that this is untried ...;-).
For a more integrated variant, using something like
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=88932
would be helpful, even though that would also not allow
you to get tags/comments/ratings if they are only
stored inside of digikams database.
I would suggest to file a new wish in the bug-tracker.


Best, Arnd