[Digikam-users] split an album into sub-albums

[Martin Burnicki]

Luca Ferrari wrote:
> The new album option is disabled unless I'm within an already existing
> album. What I would like to do is to make a set of sub-albums root
> albums, so that from:
>
> - photo
>    - 2015
>    - 2014
>
> I will have:
> - 2014
> - 2015
>
> The point is that on-disk I'd like to still have the photo grouped
> within the "photo" tree, but not having the "photo" dir included as a
> whole album, rather each content of the dir as several albums. The
> reason for this is that I'd like to split photo in smaller albums, so
> that I can archive them easily.
> Is that possible or am I misunderstanding the album concept?

If you currently already have the folder "photo" specified as
"collection" then you won't be able to add other collections with the
paths "photo/2015" and "photo/2014" since the "2014" and "2015"
subdirectories are below "photo" and thus are already included.

However, if you remove the "photo" collection first then you can
configure 2 collections with the individual paths "photo/2015",
"photo/2014", etc. which will be shown as separate albums in the album
view, e.g.

Albums
  2015
  2014

If you have tagged your images, and the tags have been also been written
to the image files then this should be no problem, since the "new"
collections are scanned and the Metatags are read from the files.

However, if your tags have *not* been written to the image files then
Metatags might eventually get lost if you remove the original collection
and add new ones.

So in this case IMO a safe way would be to
- rename the existing Album "photos" to  "photos.org" or something in DK

- create new directories "photos/2014", "photos/2015" using a file manager

- add the new, empty directories as additional collections in DK

so in DK you should have following albums:

Albums
  photo.org
    2014  (old, with images)
    2015  (old, with images)
  2014    (new, empty)
  2015    (new, empty)

and you can drag and drop the image files from the old to the new albums.

Finally you should close digikam and use a file manager to move other
photos which you might not want to see in DK into the new "photo"
folder, e.g.

mv photo.org/2013 photo/

etc.


In *any* case you should make a backup copy of the DK databases
digikam4.db  and thumbnails-digikam.db, before you start, so you can
easily go back to the current state if the results are not what you
expected.

Martin