[Digikam-users] Problems with "Write Metadata to Image"

[Phil]

Hi Piter

I have the same problem in all versions since the late 3.x up to 
current, running on Mac OSX (10.6, 10.9, 10.10), with photos and 
databases (sqlite) on the local disk. I have written to the list about 
it once or twice but noone really confirmed so I have never opened a bug 
report. Now would be a good time to do that!

I find that if I keep the same selection of photos and use "Write 
Metadata to Image" a second time, a different (small) subset of the 
photos gets the truncated sidecars. That is, the affected photos appear 
to be "chosen" randomly and differently each time.

The terminal shows the following error message for each affected photo:

digikam(75673)/KEXIV2 
KExiv2Iface::KExiv2::Private::printExiv2MessageHandler: Exiv2 ( 3 ) : 
XMP Toolkit error 101: Unregistered schema namespace URI
digikam(75673)/KEXIV2 
KExiv2Iface::KExiv2::Private::printExiv2MessageHandler: Exiv2 ( 3 ) : 
Failed to encode XMP metadata.

However, as you say, "Write Metadata to Image" works on each image 
individually, so the problem is NOT caused by a bad URI in the digikam 
image metadata itself.

I did a test with darktable, which also uses Exiv2, and did not meet 
this problem. Therefore I suppose that it comes somehow from the 
specific way Exiv2 is called from within digikam.

Like you, I do not write metadata to my image files. However at one time 
I did some tests and found there was also a problem when writing tags 
simultaneously to large numbers of image files. I recall it was 
apparently random loss of some tags, not complete loss of metadata as we 
see with the sidecars.

Best
Philip

On 15/01/15 21:28, Piter Dias wrote:
> Guys,
>
> I write metadata to side car files to keep original images untouched. It
> seems that digiKam only creates the side car files after we change some
> tags or use the option "Write Metadata to Image", what I use today in
> order to create the files for a lot of old photos that I did not assign
> any tag.
>
> If I select a bunch of photos some (very few, 0.5%~1%) of side cars are
> created with just "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>" (lets call it
> "empty"). Most of them are cool.
>
> If the photo with empty side car is selected and I click "Write Metadata
> to Image", the side car is created as expected (all tags and so on).
>
> Is it a known problem? I use Windows 8.1, digiKam 4.6 and photos are in
> a samba share (under Ubuntu 14.04.1). If it is a new problem, I already
> have the DebugView but it is not clear for me, by inspecting it, why it
> is not working.
>
> Thanks a lot,
>
> _____________________
> Piter Dias
> piter.dias at piterdias.com
> www.piterdias.com <http://www.piterdias.com>
>
>
>
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