[Digikam-users] Metadata

[Anders Lund]

On Søndag den 30. juni 2013 14:17:58, Jean-François Rabasse wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Jun 2013, Elle Stone wrote:
> > I'm not sure exactly what Ander's goals are, but you just described
> > exactly what I do when I'm tagging. I go to the
> > settings/configure/metadata panel and *un*check write to the image, or
> > sidecar in my case. Then I tag. The tags are only written to the
> > database. When I'm done tagging I re-enable writing to the sidecar
> > files (the image files are all read-only) and sync the sidecars with
> > the database. It's cumbersome and I wish there was an option to make
> > it happen automatically, just as you described, so there was just one
> > "sync now" button to push instead of disabling/re-enabling writing to
> > the files.
> 
> I think many users work more or less that way, for already stated
> reasons. (The major reason beeing to avoid the overload raised by the
> update process.)
> And this is militant in favour of delayed update. Also it should be
> kept in mind that Digikam doesn't use/need metadata from files (except
> in some special cases, images import or new images scan at startup,
> where metadata will be extracted once to setup an initial database state.)
> So, clearly, files or sidecars update is never urgent, as long as the
> database reflects the current state.

I don't know if "delayed" is any good. 

In my workflow, I typically import, select, tag, process and export images. 
When exporting, having those metadata writte to the image is smart.

Writing meta data to images, I assume, is a question of copying data from the 
digikam db into the image or sidecar file. So everytime an images data 
changes, it should go into the queue, unless it is allready there. Now if the 
actual data writing is done by a spearate process, what is the problem? That 
process must then be throtteled, so that it does not take the system down.
 
When exporting, it could be checked if the image is in the metadata writing 
queue, so it can be processed there prior to exporting.

-- 
Anders