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

[Peter Shute]

I can't help you trying to find the lost tags, but I suspect you will be told they're gone (I hope not), and that you should have kept a backup of the database.  I learned the hard way about the latter too, but only lost a few hours work, so not that much of a problem.

I notice that Lightroom is configured to request a backup once a week by default, and all you have to do is tell it where you want it to be stored.  I wonder if digiKam should do this too, rather than requiring you to work out which files to copy yourself.

________________________________
From: Jim Dory [james at dorydesign.com]
Sent: Monday, 22 February 2010 6:11 AM
To: digikam-users at kde.org
Subject: [Digikam-users] lost all tags on canon raw images

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