[Digikam-users] merge two collections including metadata

[Simon Oosthoek]

Hi

currently I have two semi-separate digikam collections, one on a desktop 
PC and another on the laptop. For practical reasons (desktop is in the 
attic always on, laptop is downstairs, easy access) the collection on 
the laptop contains most of the newer files and recently I've started to 
add tags there as well. On the desktop I already had a digikam 
collection and there are some tags there as well. I sometimes rsync the 
laptop's collection to my desktop, so most of the photos on my laptop 
are also on the desktop, obviously the digikam db is largely unaware of 
this.
Most photos are two files, one ARW and a JPG, sometimes I have more 
files for a single shot generated by the gimp from the ARW file. When I 
tag files, I try to tag both the raw and the jpeg versions, but digikam 
doesn't write tags to the ARW files, so when I transfer the files to my 
desktop, half the images lose the tags.

How can this be resolved properly?

I know digikam can now use a centralised mysql db. One scenario might be 
that I use mysql on the desktop pc and use NFS+remote mysql from the 
laptop to have only a single store of images+metadata. This is fine for 
at home, but when I go on holiday and my laptop is used to store the 
images during the holiday (in digikam of course), I have to merge stuff 
again. And of course, the first time I still need to combine the two 
collections...

I can imagine a tool that makes it possible to merge a (remote) 
collection into the current one, using some user interaction to input 
the location of the images and the sqlite/mysql database and then copy 
both the images and the metadata to the current collection. if the file 
is already in the current collection, users should be able to select a 
solution (e.g. they might be in different relative locations or they 
have the same name, but have different tags or even have the same name, 
but are completely different images (different cameras with same 
filename structure, counter overflow+reset))

does such a tool exist? or should this be a wish filed to bugs.kde.org?

If possible I'd love something like this, as a commandline replacement 
for rsync...

Cheers

Simon