[Digikam-users] digiKam ate my tags: bug, feature, or user-error?

[Elle Stone]

Hi All,

Awhile back I was merrily tagging along with digiKam 1.7 (Ubuntu 10.10). The
next day I realized I'd lost most of the tags for around 350 images.
Couldn't figure out what happened, forgot about it.

A couple days ago I lost most of the tags from 1,100 images. Fortunately,
this time I had back-ups of the images "before tag loss". I'm not sure if I
was using 1.7, 1.9, or 2.0, because in an effort to get the elusive exiv2
0.21 installed and the digikam libkexiv2 wrapper using 0.21, I've done a lot
of compiling from svn in the last couple of days. At this moment I have
digiKam 1.9 as "alongside" in /usr/local/bin, and then digiKam 2.0 beta in
/usr/bin (alas the "alongside" part isn't working, so to switch versions
means swapping out .kde folders).

Here's how the tags disappeared: 

First, my tags are all arranged in hierarchies under the top categories
"who, what, where, why, how" with also an assortment of other tags. The
"who" tags have subtags "friends," "family," & "strangers", with sub-subtags
for individuals. The "where" tag hierarchy has subtags by
country/state/province/city/sublocations.

One of the "why" subtags is "family and friends". The 1,100 "family and
friends" images had all of the people already tagged and also all of these
images had the appropriate "where" tags.

I created a new tag with some sub-tags, selected all of the "friends and
family" images, applied the new tag. digiKam was configured to write tags
and captions to the images. Which it did. Immediately. Usually I disable the
"write metadata" option until I'm ready to write a whole bunch of metadata
at once, at the end of a tagging session, because otherwise digiKam slows
down a bit when doing a lot of tagging. But this time when I started
digiKam, I forgot to check the metadata writing settings before beginning to
tag images. I wish digiKam had the option to "only write metadata to the
images upon specific request". But it doesn't (unless I missed something).

Anyway, having applied the new tag to my 1,100 images, I shut down digiKam.
The next day I started digiKam and created a new database, to my surprise
none of the friends and family images had "who" or "where" tags. Why a new
database? well, 2.0 can't use old databases, and also I'd already saved my
tags to the image metadata, or so I thought.

So I started testing in 1.9 and then in 2.0. Create a test database and tag
away. Then create a new tag and apply it to all your images (with write
metadata enabled, of course). Any tag not shared in common with all the
images (where, who) is lost from the image's own metadata. But it is still
in the database. Check a single image's metadata in digiKam - you can see
that the tags are not there, and exiftool confirms. Look at the tags on the
thumbnail display - the tags are all there - in the database but not in the
image itself. 

Writing the new tag erased all the old tags. In IMatch, this behavior was an
option. You could also choose to "add" tags rather than "replace" tags. I
always assumed that digiKam always replaced ALL the tags in the image with
ALL the tags in the database, old tags and tags-just-applied. But it seems
that is not true.

Now leaving digiKam open, go do something else in digiKam. Just tag a single
image. Now all the previously tagged images still don't have the old tags in
their metadata, only the new tag and any in-common tags. But now select all
the images and write metadata to the images from the Images drop-down menu.
And presto, the tags are now in the image as well as in the database. At
least in 1.9. I can't get 2.0 to write out the old tags back to the images,
which seems to be a really bad bug, unless my installation of 2.0 is not
quite right (very possible).

Hope that is not too confusing. I've checked several times. It is
repeatable.

So - feature? bug? borked installation? user error? (in which case please,
please tell me the right way to apply new tags)

Elle

-- 
View this message in context: http://digikam.1695700.n4.nabble.com/digiKam-ate-my-tags-bug-feature-or-user-error-tp3238857p3238857.html
Sent from the digikam-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.