[digiKam-users] New to digikam

[Peter Albrecht]

Hello Santiago,

welcome to the digiKam mailing list.

DigiKam only stores links to the pictures in the filesystem in its database.


To organize your pictures, I would do the following:

1. make a table with all your folders containing pictures:
   - column 01: "Laptop / Storage device"
   - column 02: "Filesystem path"
   - column 03: "copied to new picture storage"
   - column 04: "deleted from old storage"
   - one row for every "old storage location

2. for every row on your list:
     2.1 copy the pictures from "old storage location" to "new storage"
     2.2 check if "number of files" and "folder size" are equal
     2.3 put a "check" mark in column 03 of your table in the appropriate row

3. verify, that there is a "check" mark in column 03 for every row in your table

4. make a backup of your new picture storage

5. for every row on your list:
    5.1 delete the pictures on your old storage
    5.2 put a "check" mark in column 04 of your table

6. start digiKam and add your "new storage" as new collection
   (if you want to modify collections after the first start of digiKam, go to
   Settings -> Configure digiKam -> Collections)

7. digiKam will start to scan this new storage and add database entries for
   every picture found. The picture only exists in the filesystem (where you
   copied to in step 2.1). The digikam database only stores: e.g.
   "picture resides in path '/home/user/Pictures/album01/myPicture01.jpg'

8. to remove duplicates, you can use "Tools -> Find Duplicates"


I am still using digiKam 5.9 (Debian Jessie). I have 47.000 pictures in my
digiKam database at the moment and I have no problems, using the SQLite databse.


Hope, this helps.


Regards,

	Peter


On 28.07.19 19:11, santiago wrote:
> Hi... I am new to digikam.... I do really  have a big mess of photographs all
> around hard drives, SDs, and local drives in several computers.  Some
> pictures or perhaps many are duplicated..... So I want to fix this mess and
> organize my photographs.  What I do want to do is to centralize all pictures
> in a high capacity hard drive (external), back it up and the delete the
> photographs in the source drives...... What would be the right steps to do
> it in order to proceed systematically and safely, without duplicating files
> and ending up with a bigger mess! It is not clear to me if Digikam stores
> automatically the photos in  the database or just it keeps a link with the
> source file or a thumbnail.  I would kindly appreciate your advice and
> guidance.  I do not know how many photographs do I have, so I wonder if it
> would be OK to change to Mysql at the very beginning .??  I have an Asus
> laptop computer with Windows.  Regards  Santiago (Mexico)
> 
> 
> 
> --
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>