[digiKam-users] Catalogues across the LAN

[Christof Elmiger]

When I started out with a similar set-up (Synology NAS with 
MariaDB,moderate photo-archive  of ca. 250'000 Photos / 370 GB on that 
NAS , Windows-PC, connected with LAN, Digikam) I too experienced that 
the initial catalogue was not complete with all thumbnails/preview 
photos, even after ca. 1 day of processing photos. A second or maybe 
third scan / refresh went much quicker and improved the situation very much.

In the digikam-docs it says, that with large collections one should set 
some special parameters for the database *1* (see below). As I didn't 
quite know how to set these parameters, I did not follow this advice and 
hoped it would work out in the end. It did.

I still experience the slow startup-times, but I think there is a 
setting somewhere that allows to skip refreshing the database at 
startup, therefore speeding things up. I prefer slow start and 
automatically refreshed database, as I'm not the only one accessing 
these photos and others may place photos on the share without using digikam.

best regards


*1* from 
https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/extragear-graphics/digikam/using-setup.html#using-setup-database:

"Also, if you have an enormous collection, you should start the MySQL 
server with mysql --max_allowed_packet = 128M. (If you’re well 
acquainted with using MySQL, you could also change your settings in 
my.ini or ~/.my.cnf files). "






I'm having real problems with Digikam running on a catalogue that's sitting
on my NAS. It seems like it's just not set up to run this way.

I have 400k photos in a NAS share, and have done a full import (into an
internal MySQL DB) which took over 2 days. I'd expect, at that point, to be
able to browse, search and generally work with the catalogue efficiently
when on my home network with direct access to the NAS. However, the startup
time is abysmal (a few minutes before I get any GUI at all) and a lot of
the time I just get white 'documents' when searching or browsing, rather
than thumbnails. If I double-click one of the search results, I get the
editor with a message saying Cannot load "". Why would this be? Is it
because I've had Digikam open when I've left my LAN (i.e., had my laptop on
at work), and so it's 'lost' the connection to the NAS shared folder, and
doesn't ever restore it? If so, is there anything I can do to make it more
resilient?

I've tried Digikam 5.9, 6.0 and 6.1, and with SQLLite, and with internal
MySQL, and it just seems awfully slow and unwieldy. I was really hoping
that I'd be able to switch to using it as a replacement for Lightroom, but
so far the experience has made it unusable. Any tips to make it work in a
slick manner?