[Digikam-users] some questions about digikam metadata, DB and simultaneous use

[M. Fioretti]

Hi,

I have a few interrelated questions on these topics. The connection
among them is how to use digikam as a grouèp, that is 2 or more people
that want to build, manage, tag, rate, comment, geotag... the same set
of pictures collaboratively.

1) what parts, exactly, of the digikam database can NOT be saved into
   the pictures? I tried to search online a database description,
   without success but the google cache version of
   http://fossies.org/linux/misc/digikam-2.9.0.tar.gz:a/digikam-2.9.0/core/project/documents/DBSCHEMA.ODS
   from that table, I understand that "only" the album, albumroots and
   tag trees table remain (rightly) outside the pictures. Is this
   correct?

2) wrt to metadata saved inside pictures, I have the feeling I read
   somewhere that digikam can save in XMP, ITPC and EXIF format, but
   only to jpg and tiff files. Am I wrong?

3) I have not clear, when it comes to the CURRENT versions of digikam,
   what the situation is when it comes to simultaneous use of the same
   digikam album/database. More exactly:

   user A and user B have two Linux computers, with the same version
   of digikam, on the same LAN. The pictures are on a NFS shared
   folder, say /pictures, and their two copies of digikam both point
   to the same database (which with such a setup could ONLY be mysql,
   right?). Is it still true, as I read in the archives of this list,
   that if both A and B have digikam open simultaneously, only the
   user who started it first will have write access to the database?

   If not, will Bad Things happen even if there is NO access to the same
   records?

   Basically, I want to know if there's any way for me and my wife to
   sit down together, each with a laptop, fire up digikam on the two
   laptops, and say "OK, now I tag this month's pictures, you tag the
   previous month, then each of us also saves all the metadata he
   generated to the corresponding picture files", on the SAME set of
   pictures, and the SAME database.

TIA,
Marco