[Digikam-users] where do my tags go?

[Tim Jenness]

I've been a happy user of digikam 0.9.x for a long time now and have happily
tagged nearly 40,000 photos. I just took the plunge and upgraded to v0.10
and I'm impressed with the changes. One thing worries me though, and that is
what has happened to my hierarchical tags? I have tags like:

  person/family/tim
  person/family/john
  person/friend/tim

and I write the tags to my data files. With v0.9 I got tags of
person/family/a etc but now the EXIF header only reports "tim" (and in the
above example it would not distinguish "person/friend/tim" from
"person/family/tim"). Looking around on the mailing list I see mention that
digikam now uses a private "digiKam" XMP namespace for writing the true
hierarchical tag and writes flat tags to the IPTC section. That's fine as
well but I'd feel happier about it if

 1. exiftool reported that it could find the digiKam namespace (or exiv2
could). Can someone tell me how?
 2. digikam itself reported the values when using the metadata tab. It
reports the IPTC information that was written to the file such as copyright
and the flattened tags, but the XMP section is blank.

ie if there was any proof at all that I actually ended up with the
hierarchical tags in the file. It would still be nice if there was an option
to store the hierarchical form in the IPTC section for export so that tools
like Google Picasa or Lightroom could read them (especially given the
ambiguity in my example above) [although I imagine that populating the LR
XMP namespace would be more appropriate for Lightroom users]

One other problem is I believe fixed in v1.0. That concerns the way that
when digikam is writing tags to a file that was tagged by v0.9.x you end up
with person/family/tim and "tim" in the file since the tags are not ever
removed by digikam. I think beta2 fixed that but I'm unable to test at the
moment.

Thanks again for the software. It's the best app I have ever used. I'm just
having trust issues with v0.10.0.

Tim
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