[Digikam-users] Confused about "created" date/time on some photos

[Michael Liddle]

Hi there,

I'm new to digikam (using version 0.10 on openSuse 11), but am enjoying
it all so far, so thanks!

However I have some photos that I "processed" years ago (2004). In doing
so I (unknowingly) wiped all the EXIF data from them (I will thus refer
to them as "unEXIFed"). Naturally digikam had to guess their "creation"
date from the file modification time (earlier this year when they were
copied to their current location).

Fortunately I still had the original photos lying around, and was able
to use `exiftool` to copy the EXIF tags back into the processed
versions, _replacing_ an unEXIFed file with an "EXIFed" file (while
digikam was not running). I expected that when digikam was restarted it
would notice that these tags had been changed, rescan them and all would
be OK. Unfortunately not, despite the correct (2004) EXIF tags now
showing up in the digikam right-hand sidebar when I select the image(s),
it was still using the _unEXIFed_ modification dates as "creation" date
for the now EXIFed files. So I ran a full image/DB metadata sync (from
the "Tools" menu). Still no luck :(

A look in the digikam DB (using sqlite3) shows a few interesting things.
Firstly there seems to be two entries for the offending images in the
Images table: one with 'album' = "" and one with the correct 'album' id.
The hashes of these two entries are different however; and the
'Images,modificationDate' fields match that of the unEXIFed images and
the EXIFed one respectively. Seems like the one with 'album' = "" is
left-over from the (overwritten) unEXIFed file. Expected behaviour?

Secondly the 'ImageInformation.creationDate' values for these images are
 the same for both entries (EXIFed and unEXIFed): the file modification
date for the unEXIFed file. So it looks like the scan definitely hasn't
picked the EXIF date from the EXIFed file.

In general I'm a bit confused about what's gone on here.

Is there anyway that I can fix these dates up?

Is it safe to just delete the the rows with album = ""?

Should I file a bug?

Thanks very much,
Michael Liddle.