[Digikam-users] Digikam in a multi-user network environment

[Geert Janssens]

Hi, I've been using Digikam since 0.8.x and I'm quite happy with its many features.

Recently I started using digikam in a networked environment, with multiple users on different computers accessing a central image store on a server.

I have come across some issues in this setup that I would like other's opinions and suggestions on.

1. Tagging
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As the image store is growing large (over 17.000 pictures at this moment), I turned to tagging in an attempt to organize the images. This worked nice on my pc, but when I wanted use the tags on another pc, I found out the tags were not set on that PC !

I found a partial solution: I now store the tags as IPTC keywords. But this has it's own set of problems:
* When I set tags on one system, I have to synchronize the database with the images on all the other systems. For my image store, it takes more than 15 minutes to synchronize on one other PC. When tag information is frequently updated by the different users, this becomes cumbersome.

* Digikam seems only capable of altering IPTC information (and other metadata) on jpeg files and not on any of the other image formats it supports (like png, tif, bmp, xcf). So if the image is not jpeg, the tags can't be synchronized via the above IPTC trick.