[digiKam-users] Confused by tick boxes in "Edit Metadata" + how does "Captions" interact?

[Chris Green]

This is all on Digikam 5.6 running in xubuntu 18.04.

Firstly the tick-boxes in "Edit Metadata".  Each item you can edit has
a tick box, what does it do?  Does it simply mean "you can change this
item", does it mean that the item gets written to metadata when you
click "Apply" or "OK", or what does it mean?

There are also the three extra tick boxes which I assume are the ones
that copy metadata between Exif, IPTC and XMP.  However there is some
confusion here too (for me anyway!), what is JFIF?  After some
experimentation it seems that Exif Comment means Exif Caption and that
when the 'sync' tick-box is ticked then whenever an item is *changed*
then the corresponding other metadata is synchronised.  This can be a
bit confusing if, for example, "Sync Exif Comment" is ticked for both
XMP and IPTC.

Also how does the "Captions" section of the sidebar interact with
all the above?


What would also be really, really useful would be a listing of which
Exif, IPTC and XMP fields correspond to each field in the "Edit
Metadata" section as this would clear up any ambiguity between
"Comment", "Caption", "Description" and similar.  Either this or give
the actual field names in the "Edit Metadata", e.g. you could put

Caption (Exif.Photo.UserComment):



Finally (yes, I know there are lots of questions here) when changing
an item does it get written to both database and image on both "Apply"
and "Exit" if one has ticked all the boxes in "Write this information
to the Metadata"?


-- 
Chris Green
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