[Digikam-users] Best method to move the complete photo collection

[cl at isbd.net]

Daniel Bauer <linux at daniel-bauer.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Am 23.03.2015 um 20:11 schrieb cl at isbd.net:
> >
> > (I really cannot understand why anyone would ever *not* write the
> > metadata to file)
> >
> 
> This is not on the topic of the thread, but there a many reasons NOT to 
> write metadata to files.
> 
> I don't want to give my clients photos with my personal evaluation nor 
> with the indexing keywords under which I catalog them. I don't want 
> clients or models real names appear in images.
> 
> If I'd have tags in the images meta data I'd always have to be VERY 
> careful to strip them before delivery or upload on any website. I'm sure 
> I'd forget it from time to time or upload a tagged version instead of a 
> stripped one. This could have consequences...
> 
> So this is ONE reason not to have tags in image files. For sure many 
> more exist. For sure also many reasons exist to have them written to the 
> files and it is very good, that it is possible for those to whom it 
> serves. I for my part am happy that I can choose not to save my tages in 
> the images...
> 
All very true but it's very, very risky I think.  You are always at
risk of losing the metadata.

As far as I understand how things work if your main digikam store
fails in any way you will lose the metadata if it's stored only in the
database.  This is because Digikam will reconstruct the database when
you restore from backup.  Backing up the database file doesn't help
because it won't work on a new disk drive, Digikam rebuilds it. (Well
it might work if you restore to exactly the same place on the same
disk drive but that assumes the disk drive hasn't failed)

There needs to be a way to copy a collection of Digikam images and its
database in a way that allows copying the metadata from one database
file to another.  At present I think the only way to copy is to write
all the metadata to file, then copy all the image files, then recreate
the database from the metadata in the files.

-- 
Chris Green
·