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

[Elle Stone]

On 10/24/12, Marcel Wiesweg <marcel.wiesweg at gmx.de> wrote:
> See bug 268688 and some similar reports.
> Lot of work for a proper solution.

That is the most depressing bug report I've ever read.

Writing *only* to the database has the advantage that writing to the
database is very fast and the disadvantage that if the database fails,
you lose all your metadata.

Writing to the database AND the images has the advantage that if the
database fails, you still have your metadata. It has the disadvantage
that writing to the images is slow: fixing leftover tags on 4000
images took hours on my not-so-new computer. Writing to the images has
the further disadvantage that if digiKam makes a mistake or has a bug
(it happens), you can lose your metadata or otherwise corrupt your
image.

Writing to the database and to an XMP sidecar file seems to be the
best of both worlds. Writing to the XMP text file is faster than
writing to image files. And I can check the contents of the XMP files
and if everything looks right, periodically use exiftool to transfer
the XMP file metadata over to the image file, thus keeping the
metadata in the image file in case the database fails (I've had bad
experiences with digiKam writing to the image files).

Unfortunately, writing to the XMP sidecar files doesn't work because I
can't keep the XMP sidecar files in synch with the database.

On 10/24/12, Andrew Goodbody <ajg02 at elfringham.co.uk> wrote:
> On 24/10/12 19:21, Marcel Wiesweg wrote:
> Yes, it's a long standing issue. It means that digikam currently behaves
> in a non-intuitive way. I suspect that many people are editing their
> tags hierarchy without realising that any already tagged photos are not
> being updated resulting in inconsistencies.
>
> It is the single biggest thing that I would like to be fixed in digikam.
>
> Andrew

Agreed. I have around 10,000 scans and raw files that I haven't yet
added to the digiKam database, because I never quite felt like I had a
"workflow that works". So I am at a loss as to how to procede. Even if
writing metadata to the image files weren't so slow, I don't want to
risk writing to these additional image files. And using XMP sidecar
files seems not possible at present.

Elle


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