[Digikam-users] tags/keywords between Adobe Lightroom and Digikam

[Jim Dory]

Hello,

I'm still a photoshop user and have been trying out Lightroom as it
works well with photoshop. Hence, I'm running both in a Virtualbox
virtual machine.

For general importing of photos, tagging, viewing, and some
manipulation, I use Digikam. Have for quite some time. I don't
generally leave my Windows VM machine running, so if I want to use
Lightroom or photoshop I have to fire it up.

A few versions of Digikam back, I was doing a lot of tagging. I either
had tiff images from scans, jpegs from cheaper cameras, then CR2 files
from Canon that I converted to DNG before tagging. When I got
Lightroom, again a few versions back, it seemed to read all my tags
fine. In Lightroom I can search all those tags (keywords in LR) just
fine. But now (don't know if it is because of changes in newer
versions of one or both these fine programs) neither recognizes the
tags/keywords of the other no matter the image format.

I am not very smart on metadata.. have a hard time understanding that.
Is there something I need to set in one or both these programs that
will allow each to read the tags?

Also, regarding CR2 vs. DNG conversions, I'm sitting on the fence. It
seems backing up xmp files is convenient when changes have been made
to just raw files or metadata, vs. backing up the whole cr2. But DNG
is pretty convenient too. (I still keep all CR2 backed up on external
disk). Lightroom, when tagging CR2 files does create a xmp file.
Digikam does not seem to recognize that. When tagging a CR2 file in
Digikam, it doesn't seem to create an xmp file but must write the tag
somewhere else.. metadata? or database?. Regardless, Lightroom doesn't
see it.

So at some point I may decide to work with just one of these programs
but would like to make sure if I tag in one, I wouldn't then have to
redo it all should I choose the other program. So this question is for
my convenience, but perhaps if someone can help it will help others
too. I did look back several pages in archives but didn't stumble upon
the answer.

cheers, Jim