[Digikam-users] How to remove "left behind" tag tree

[Elle Stone]

I posted an article with example exiftool commands for wholesale
removal of digiKam-written metadata:
http://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/dam-software-metadata.html

For every bit of metadata that you add with digiKam, usually more than
one metadata field get written to the image. For instance tag tree
information needs to be removed from three metadata locations, rating
information from 4 locations, caption information from 7 locations,
and so on.

Exiftool is very powerful and works fast. Which means a mistyped
command can wreck havoc on your image files. So please, please, please
make a backup of your images and your digiKam database, and make sure
that Exiftool is doing exactly what you want, by trying all the
commands on a test folder of images, before deploying on images that
matter.

I went through the procedure outlined in the article with all of my
own images, and once I worked out which commands to use, the procedure
was relatively painless and quick. I ended up finding and removing a
ton of old, unwanted, and out-of-date metadata left behind by various
DAM softwares that I've used at one time or another (digiKam isn't the
only DAM software that can leave metadata in a messy state).

Once all tag-tree information is removed from the image files, if
digiKam is at least temporarily set up to not write to the image files
(only to the database), then you can rearrange the tag tree without
creating left-behind, unwanted tags. Unfortunately, as soon as you
start writing tags to the image again, then rearranging the tag tree
will result in image and database again being out of synchronization.

Elle

-- 
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Articles and tutorials on open source digital imaging and photography