[Digikam-users] Interoperating with iPhoto

[David Talmage]

David Lee wrote:

> I wanted to use digikam along with iPhoto on a common image library that's 
> located on an external harddrive. Currently, the library is an iPhoto library 
> that my wife uses with her Macbook. We share the external harddrive, and 
> sometimes, I would like to access the images in the iPhoto library with my 
> computer, which runs KDE.

I can tell you about managing photos with Digikam and importing them 
into iPhoto.  I learned how to do that about two weeks ago.  I have two 
Mac Minis.  They share a NAS box.  I run iPhoto on the one attached to 
the television.  I run KDE and Digikam under VirtualBox 
(http://www.virtualbox.org/) on the desktop Mini.

I manage all of the pictures with Digikam.  I save the metadata in each 
file.  iPhoto reads the metadata when it imports the photos.  I think 
it's XMP that iPhoto supports.  It's the one that supports hierarchical 
tags.  (I'm not at that computer now and won't be for several days. 
That's not helpful.  I'm sorry.)

I don't think that iPhoto recognizes changes in embedded metadata.  I 
think I've had to make iPhoto re-import the image.

Dave