[Digikam-users] digiKam "broke" - digiKam/GIMP issue?

[Elle Stone]

A couple days ago I had digiKam running while also running GIMP 2.9. I 
saved a GIMP file to disk, to a folder that digiKam monitors. Saving the 
GIMP file to disk seemed to be taking a very long time, with one CPU 
core running at 100%.

But checking htop, it turned out to be digiKam that was occupying the 
CPU core, not GIMP. So I (tried to) close digiKam. The digiKam UI closed 
but the digiKam process was still running, so I ended up killing the 
digiKam process using htop.

I tried to reproduce the issue, but couldn't trigger the same sequence 
of events.

Today I triggered the same sequence of events. Except this time digiKam 
seemed broken. It hung at 97% in the progress bar and never displayed 
the image thumbnails, rendering digiKam unuseable. And it occupied 100% 
of one CPU core. Restarting digiKam didn't help, and neither did 
restarting the computer or recompiling/updating digiKam.

I run Gentoo Linux. Here's the component information:

digiKam version 4.14.0
CPU cores: 8
Demosaic GPL2 pack support: Yes
Demosaic GPL3 pack support: Yes
Exiv2 can write to Jp2: Yes
Exiv2 can write to Jpeg: Yes
Exiv2 can write to Pgf: Yes
Exiv2 can write to Png: Yes
Exiv2 can write to Tiff: Yes
Exiv2 supports XMP metadata: Yes
LibCImg: 130
LibEigen: 3.2.8
LibExiv2: 0.25
LibJPEG: 62
LibJasper: 1.900.1
LibKDE: 4.14.15
LibKExiv2: 2.3.2
LibKGeoMap: 3.1.0
LibKdcraw: 2.4.2
LibLCMS: 2070
LibLensFun: 0.3.1-0
LibLqr support: yes
LibPGF: 6.12.27
LibPNG: 1.6.19
LibQt: 4.8.6
LibRaw: 0.16.0
LibTIFF: LIBTIFF, Version 4.0.3 Copyright (c) 1988-1996 Sam Leffler 
Copyright (c) 1991-1996 Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Marble Widget: 0.19.2 (stable release)
Parallelized demosaicing: Yes
RawSpeed codec support: No
Baloo support: no
Database backend: QSQLITE
Kdepimlibs support: no
Kipi-Plugins: 4.12.0
LibGphoto2 support: no
LibKface: 3.5.1
LibKipi: 2.1.0
LibOpenCV: 3.1.0
Sqlite2 support: no

I had a similar and probably the exact same issue with some GIMP 2.8 XCF 
files awhile back (maybe a couple of years ago). So "something" about 
some GIMP files seems to make digiKam very unhappy.

Moving the last-saved GIMP file to a folder that's not monitored by 
digiKam allowed digiKam to start and run without any issues.

The GIMP file in question is 2.0GB, so I can't send it along as a test 
file. But if it's the same problem as a couple of years ago, it also 
sometimes happens with very small GIMP files.

As a test I modified the problem XCF file (removed two layers) and saved 
it back to the digiKam-monitored folder, and digiKam had no issues with 
it. But "undoing" the change in GIMP and resaving the file triggered the 
digiKam issue.

Anyone have any idea why some GIMP XCF files cause issues with digiKam?

Best,
Elle