[Digikam-users] about "synchronizing XMP sidecars and the digiKam database"

[M. Fioretti]

Hi Elle, and list!

I 've been thinking a bit about what Elle explains here:

http://ninedegreesbelow.com/photography/dam-software-metadata.html

in the section "synchronizing XMP sidecars and the digiKam database"

> I want the speed and convenience of writing only to the database,
> and the safety of writing to a sidecar file. So during any given
> tagging session I set digiKam to write only to the database. At the
> end of each tagging session I change the settings and write
> everything out to sidecar files. Setting and resetting the digiKam
> metadata settings (Bug 227814) gets a bit tedious, but not as
> tedious as waiting for digiKam to write out a tag to a whole bunch
> of files every time I make a change on the tag tree.

my question is: can't we let the _computer_ (NOT digiKam!) take care
of this automatically? What if the user NEVER ever uses DK to write
metadata to image or sidecar files, but ONLY works in the database,
and a shell script runs automatically every ten minutes and:

- if digikam is running, set a RESYNC flag

- if digikam is NOT running and RESYNC is set (i.e. max ten minutes
  after you closed DK))

  - reads metadata from DK database
  - writes them with exiftool, to image or sidecar files, depending on
    configuration
  - reset RESYNC flag

no manual set and reset in each session, no wait for digiKam bugs to
be fixed (or new featurs to be implemented)...

could this work? Does it have any drawback? Oh, and of course: where
is, exactly, the documentation to study to write such a script,
without reverse-engineering the files generated by digiKam?

Marco