[digiKam-users] Digikam, Tags and Raw files

[Matthieu]

Dear all,

I use Digikam for many years: this is a powerful tool which cover almost
all the features I expect from this kind of software; bugs are also quickly
fixed, new features are add very often.

But unfortunately, since tags are not written in the RAW files, I spend
many time to manage my photo collection of 25k files: I have more than 66%
of my photos which are raw files, the 33 remaining % are shared in JPG, and
videos files.

Yesterday, for an unknown reason, my tags tree crashed.

I thought reloading tags from the metadatas stored in my files, but because
they are not written anymore in the RAW files, the only process I have to
restore my job is to do manually a second time.
Many months of job to redo.

How to backup digikam is not the subject of this email :)

I can understand that there are some risk to update RAW files.

But I'm ready to take this risk for the following reasons:
- For the last 2 or 3 years I updated my RAW files with both Digikam (when
this feature was available), and with exiftool. I never encountered any
issue.
- I use Digikam to help me managing my photo collection, not as a tool to
view my picture collection: if I define a tag in a raw file in Digikam, I
expect being able to view this tag in a different software (rawtherapee,
lightraw, etc)
- Today, I have some differences between data stored in my RAW files
content, and the Digikam database.

This is your product, with their own constraints. I use it as it because it
was helping me to earn time.
But sometimes, I need to find some workarounds to adapt it as the way I
manage my pictures.
Since this feature has been disabled, I was thinking editing correctly all
my files in Digikam, and then develop a software / plugin / shell scripts /
which would process the Digikam database and store the missing tags with
exiftool.

The crash I got yesterday let me think differently...
So my question now: the checkbox to use the experimental feature to write
tags in raw files is unchecked since the 5.9 release (those one I use). If
I'm able to uncheck it in the sources files, will I be able to restore this
feature? Or did you also remove all the writing process behind when
disabling this feature?

If this is the second answer, which risks I 'll encounter to downgrade my
Diigikam release to the latest one where this feature was available ? (5.8
or 5.7 if I remember well) ?

Thanks in advance for your help

Kind regards

Matthieu
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