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

[Simon Cropper]

On 17/08/12 19:11, Peter Albrecht wrote:
> 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.
>>
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Peter,

Metadata can be extracted using exiftools, so either with python or bash 
you should be able to filter out changes, as long as you kept a version 
of the extracted metadata at the last backup.

-- 
Cheers Simon

    Simon Cropper - Open Content Creator

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