[Digikam-users] where do my tags go?

[Mikolaj Machowski]

On Friday 10 July 2009 10:13:31 Tim Jenness wrote:
> 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

Yeah, that bug existed... Unfortunately don't know if it was fixed in later 
versions.

> 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.

digiKam supports XMP starting from 0.10.0 . That means that any XMP info will 
be added only for photos which were tagged in 0.10.0 (or later). You could 
also choose tool "Synchronise all images with database". But in your situation 
I don't advise it - data written to images will be this improperly imported.

> 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]

Recent SVN versions are supporting LR XMP namespace.

m.