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

[Remco Viëtor]

On Wednesday 24 October 2012 20:36:30 Andrew Goodbody wrote:
> On 24/10/12 19:21, Marcel Wiesweg wrote:
> > See bug 268688 and some similar reports.
> > Lot of work for a proper solution.
> 
> 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
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One of the problems you face in correcting this behaviour is that when you 
make any change in the tag tree, potentially ALL your images (or sidecars) 
will have to be rewritten. If you are doing some extensive re-organisation 
of the tree, this can happen multiple times. So simply synchronising the 
changes with the file metadata can get very, very slow (not to mention risk 
of write errors, but for that we have backups, in theory...). It will also 
feel very slow: you have a number of changes in mind, but after every 
chance you'll have to wait while Digikam updates the affected files

I think something like this asks for a kind of 'maintenance mode', where 
changes are put in a queue, and when you exit the maintenance mode, all 
changes are made in batch (to both database and images). If you cancel 
maintenance, no changes will happen. 
That would allow each image to be touched only once at most, speeding up 
the whole process (*): checking what has to be done for an image only 
requires database access. In addition, if modifications of the tag tree 
outside maintenance mode are forbidden(**), it'll remind you that changing 
your tag organisation is something you should be doing rarely (IMO).

(*) There's still a lot of images to be rewritten, but that happens at a 
moment where the user has finished changing stuff, so it won't interfere as 
much.

(**) addition of tags can still be allowed, as it only affects selected 
images, and only adds to the metadata, nothing has to be removed.

Remco
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