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

[Elle Stone]

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

As a personal solution to digiKam's current difficulties keeping the
database and the sidecars and/or image files synchronized, such a
script is always an option, assuming someone has the expertise to
write a script that reads a database (way out of my league).

A few DAM tools (Resource Space, for one) do use exiftool, but for
whatever good and valid reason, digiKam decided to use exiv2 instead
of exiftool, probably because of the perl dependency? So digiKam
itself is not likely to ever interact with exiftool.

>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?

Such a script would need constant updating to keep up with the latest
digiKam/exiv2. The digiKam and exiv2 source code and documentation is
always available; for low-level interactions the source code itself is
often the best documentation. Or you can write out a few test images
with all the metadata that you normally save, and check using exiftool
to see what gets written. That's probably what you mean by
reverse-engineering, but in this case I think reverse-engineering is
probably the easier way to go.

Kind regards,
Elle

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