[Digikam-users] Puzzling, and troubling, issue with empty folders

[Peter Albrecht]

Hi Guy,

I've been using DigiKam for 3 years now and never
experienced any unintentional disappearing fotos.

For backup, I use "Unison File Synchronizer"
(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/), which lists
every changed file, before copiing it to the backup storage.

Unfortunately it does not tell, what exactly changed. Great
would be something like:
   Change: myfile.jpg (added Tag: "Family")

BTW: Does somebody else know a free tool, which could do this?

Maybe using unison (or a similar backup tool), you could
detect disappearing fotos in the future.

Regards,
	Peter Albrecht

On 17.08.2012 07:04, Guy Stalnaker wrote:
> All,
> 
> About a year ago I suffered a catastrophic drive issue. I
> was able to recover images from the drive with appropriate
> tools. Glad to have images recovered, yes, but the recovery
> application named the recovered imaged with a multi-digit
> name. As such, they were relatively useless. Had no idea
> what the images were, when they were from, etc.
> 
> Using exiftool I was able to rename the files and at the
> same time organize them using the exif data they contain. 
> Once I was done with the renaming, I had multiple folders
> organized by year/month/day, with images named using this
> format: DSCN_YYYYMMDDTHHMMSS.ext.
> 
> I was able to use Digikam to find and eliminate duplicates,
> of which there were hundreds, as well as thumbnails.
> 
> I've been very happy with Digikam, but recently I've noticed
> something very puzzling. Given the way the renaming process
> works (I use Linux and I have a shell script that uses the
> commandline applications, exiftool and install, to do the
> renaming) I know, without doubt, that if there is a folder
> in my collection in the year/month hierarchy for any day in
> any month in any year, that the folder can only exist
> because the script, well exiftool in the script, **read data
> from an existing image** and used that data to create, with
> the install program, the folder the image was then put into
> by the install application.
> 
> But now, I have discovered over the past several days while
> reviewing images for a contest submission that I have over
> 50 zero-file folders in my collection. I am very troubled by
> this. I have deleted practically no image unless I knew they
> were duplicate images (in fact, I used Digikam itself to
> identify the duplicates and I reviewed them visually and
> deleted duplicates only when I could see in Digikam the two
> images side-by-side). I have nearly seven good years worth
> of images. And suddenly I see holes in my collection and I
> have no way of knowing just how significant the holes may
> be. The year 2008 does not count in the matter as I know I
> lost many of them several years ago (failed CD backup). But
> having 50+ folders with zero files in them makes me very
> worried.
> 
> Is Digikam somehow involved? Digikam is the only application
> I use to manage my collection since I stopped using Picasa a
> year ago. I still use my commandline tools, in the script,
> to move images from camera SD cards to my collection where
> Digikam has, thus far, had no problem finding them. I have
> over 22000 images. Is this a problem?
> 
> Here is what I see:
> 2012 has 1 empty folder
> 2011 has 2 empby folders
> 2010 had 4 empty folders
> 2009 has 17 empty folders!
> 2008 has 5 emtpy folders
> 2007 has 1 empty folder
> 2006 has 7 empty folders
> 2005 has 8 empty folders
> 2004 has 3 of 4 total empty
> 2003 has 5 empty folders
> 
> So, that's the report. What can I do? Is there any record
> kept by Digikam of its activities I can check? Has anyone
> else experienced sudden unusual mysterious vanishments? I'm
> worried.
> 
> Thanks for any help anyone can give.
>