[Digikam-users] What is being/will be done about the tags management problem?

[Julien T]

After following this interesting thread for the last days, my 2 cents

2013/2/19 Jean-François Rabasse <jean-francois.rabasse at wanadoo.fr>:
>
[...]
> But with XMP metadata, there's no such information. The XMP schema has
> a dedicated field, xmp:MetadataDate, that should be the last time
> metadata has been updated. Ideally, this field should be set automaticaly
> when writing metadata, but very few software do that.
> At least, the libexiv2 doesn't, too bad :-(

I agree strongly with a problem of spec but as It is probably
hard/long time before any improvements on this, digikam should provide
reasonable alternative.


> So, only the user can decide which is the reference and which is the
> outdated, and in which way to do the sync copy.

Like for a few other software, In case there is a conflict, software
should provide options: Keep either one side/newer or older/ignore/Log
and keep same option for next conflicts (what does every code
versioning stuff)

There is quiet a number of bugs for digikam+metadata
(https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?component=Metadata&product=digikam&list_id=528293).

As for me, I think "versioning of metadata" and MAC time should be one
of the solution (with the logging of any conflict and differences)
Bug 302924 - Versioning of Metadata
Bug 310067 - Optional finegrained metadata for Modified/Access/Changed
time and Digikam Last Read/Write
I don't see as a heavy thing, svn/cvs manage it pretty well. After,
need to decide if this stay in database, file, or a separate
db/svn/cvs/...
And as said before, this should stay optional/for advanced users, even
i wish the MAC time information to be standardized.

Other could-be "related" bugs
Bug 194777 - synchronize images with database does not update all
images if there are a lot of images in one album
Bug 198406 - xmp not synchronized, uncomplete
Bug 268688 - Write metadata to all images does not remove obsolete tags
Bug 220204 - digiKam could warn when writing metadata to pictures fails

And the big one when working on *lot* of pictures (>>100k) or slow
hardware but not about tags merging
Bug 227814 - "Write metadata immediately" option
Bug 222401 - Write only changed metadata to file using single button or on exit

Cheers,

Julien