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

[Elle Stone]

On 10/23/12, Marie-Noëlle Augendre <mnaugendre at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hum... I begin to understand why I encountered such weird results when
> trying to reorganize my tags tree. Though I didn't investigate, I found the
> same tags in different places or the tree, depending on different parent.
>
> Marie-Noëlle

Hi Marie-Noëlle,

If you let digiKam write to your image files, you *can* get rid of the
duplicate tags. The trick is to follow the steps below, but please
check very carefully to make sure that these steps work for you before
deploying over all your images!

1.Use "Image/reread metadata from image" to reread all the tags. The
"left-over" tags will be pulled into the digiKam database and appear
on the tag tree. If you use exiftool to check, at this point you can
see the unwanted, duplicate tag embedded in your image file:

exiftool -a -s -G1 -tagslist 041126_141312.jpg
[XMP-digiKam]   TagsList: test/test1, Intake/test/test1

2. Go to the right pane, Filters, and select ALL tags (sounds odd, but
this seems to be necessary).

3. Go to the left pane, Album, and select the root album (or at least
the album that contains all the images with the leftover/duplicate tag
you are trying to remove).

4. Go to the left pane, Tags, and select the root tag of the tag tree
you want to remove, so only images with the unwanted tag will be
displayed in the center pane. Select (highlight) all of these images.

5. Go to the right pane, Captions/Tags, uncheck the unwanted tag, and
apply. The previously selected images will disappear from the center
pane. If you use exiftool to check, you will see that now the
unwanted, duplicate tag is no longer embedded in your image file:

exiftool -a -s -G1 -tagslist 041126_141312.jpg
[XMP-digiKam]   TagsList: Intake/test/test1

6. On right pane, Tags (or any other pane that shows all the tags),
delete the unwanted duplicate tag (but only if it isn't assigned to
any other images, or else you'll have to reread the image metadata to
pull the tag back in).

7. If you reread the metadata from the image, you'll see that the
unwanted tags really are gone. If you are using this procedure on a
whole lot of images, you may need to reselect them and write the
metadata to the images, and then reread to see if the unwanted tags
were deleted from all the images. I ended up having to repeat the
procedure several times to get rid of unwanted duplicate tags written
to around 3000 images.

Unfortunately, the above steps don't work if digiKam only writes to
the xmp sidecar files instead of directly to the image. It seems that
digiKam only *adds* tags to the xmp sidecar file but never takes tags
away. So the XMP sidecar files can't be kept in synch with the digikam
database. Which for me, given my workflow, makes the sidecar files not
useable. If there is a magic procedure for synchronizing the digiKam
database and the sidecar files, hopefully someone will share.

Kind regards,
Elle