[Digikam-users] lost all tags on canon raw images

[Jim Dory]

I'm devastated, though I'm probably to blame for not understanding what I
was doing. I spent many evenings over the last few months tagging my photos
in Digikam. I've used digikam for quite some time - back in the .9 series
anyway - and through many problems it always kept the tags to my images -
though back then they were maybe all jpegs rather than raw. Just lately
however all my raw image tags disappeared - including in the list of tags in
the tagging sidebar that I had created in the last few months.

I am using Gentoo linux and probably was running Digikam in pretty much
default settings - I don't believe I had the option checked (that I've since
found) to write tags to IPTC.

My problem seemed to appear when I upgraded my kernel from a 2.6.31 to a .32
version. Apparently, at least in Gentoo, there is a bug with Gentoo's
version of those kernels that breaks connection with NFS shares. When I
first booted to the new kernel, I had apparently had Dig. running in my last
KDE 4.4 session so it fired itself back up and couldn't see the NFS share
where most images live. I figured no problem as I had had similar problems
in the past and didn't lose tags. I even used to keep the database on the
NFS shares before I learned that was a mistake and moved it to my home
directory last year. That solved other problems. So I fixed the NFS/Kernel
problem and repointed Dig. at the images. It is possible when I pointed it
at the images I pointed at a more parent directory than before to include a
few other directories with images that before I had added piecemeal. But
when the database had finally scanned in images again, all tags except the
jpeg images had been lost.

I assume they are lost for good but am posting this just in case there is
something I'm missing.

I don't have a good understanding yet of IPTC or XMP and need to read
through the manual on how D. works with them. I have VirtualBox running a
WinXP with photoshop and Adobe Bridge, and have added keywords to an image
or two in the IPTC metadata of Bridge - but when I open up D. I don't see
them in the metadata. (The IPTC and XMP sidebar windows, when I view them,
are just big blank areas - I suppose this must have something to do with
needing a template? - this is an area I need to read up on).

I've checked the first 5 or 6 settings in Settings/Common metadata actions,
and have tried adding tags to an image, but nothing shows up in the
sidebar/IPTC.

I pretty much would rather tag images in D. as Bridge so far seems more
clunky in doing that, but need to know that tags/keywords will make it into
the image metadata and hopefully be readable by other programs now and in
the future. Hopefully this is possible.

thanks for looking, Jim
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