[Digikam-users] Tag issues

[Jean-François Rabasse]

On Thu, 23 May 2013, Gerhard Hoogterp wrote:

> Hi,
>
> After a switch to opensuse I lost all my digikam settings under which the tag
> database. Luckily I use to write the metadata to the files and as such it
> should be just a matter of rereading the metadata.. or so I thought..
>
> As far as I can see I have two options.. Reread an album or use the
> maintanance option under tools which takes forever and I gather that means it
> does all the images it knows of. I just let it run for a night..
>
> Anyhow, neither of these options reads back the tags correctly.

Hi Gerhard,

Both options use your current Digikam database, and if you (possibly) 
have a mismatch problem, due to versions changes, it may not work as
expected.

But if you have all metadata in images files (wise practice) you have
nothing to expect from your current/previous database and you should try
the brutal option, rebuild all from scratch.

You will first remove your Digikam DB and also the configuration file
~/.kde4/share/config/digikamrc then restart Digikam as for a first time.
Declare your images directory/ies as new collection/s and let the
program scan for all new images. The DB should be rebuilt correctly.

(I do that two or three times a year, mostly to get rid of messy tags
and rebuild all on a neat basis. It works well. Rescan takes a bit of
time but it's not really a problem. Just start before going to lunch
and it's ok after coffee.)


> The tag should be Subjects -> Landscape. Digikam imports ¨My Tags". 
> Nothing else.  In other case it ignores the tags in the image 
> completely and doesn even use the My Tags.

Looks like metadata is not re-read, or there's a problem between your
new Digikam program and your former database version.
Do try a full rebuilt, cf. supra.


> As for now I´m wondering which fields digikan tries to read for 
> rereading the tags and if this is a knows issue.

Digikam reads several fields until a valid information is found.
xmp:digiKam:TagsList, then xmp:lr:hierarchicalSubject, etc.
And your XMP data seems all correct.

Regards,
Jean-François



PS: it's off topic but there's one thing I find a bit strange
in your metadata :

>>>> Dublin Core <<<
> Creator : G. Hoogterp
> Rights : x-default
> Source :
> Subject : Landscape
> Title : China light Rotterdam

« Rights : x-default » doesn't make sense.
dc:rights is a language alternative element and x-default is a language
specifier, not a content, so it should not display like that.

I've already seen that with older versions of Digikam (1.3 et al.) that
used a buggy version of libexiv2. When a language alternative property
was set to an empty value, the libexiv2 extracted the language 
selector, "x-default", or "en", or "fr", instead of an empty string.

Maybe your exemple image has been tagged in the past, with an older
version of Digikam ?
If so, you'll probably have to update your images credits for all your
collection.