[digiKam-users] How to start a completely new and separate digikam from appimage?

[Remco Viëtor]

On mardi 26 novembre 2019 13:06:32 CET Chris Green wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 11:26:58AM +0100, Remco Viëtor wrote:
> > On mardi 26 novembre 2019 10:33:07 CET Chris Green wrote:
> > > woenx <marcpalaus at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > Otoh, I'd rather not see creating a new database remove all the careful
> > configuration of defaults I did in the program (e.g. displayed metadata,
> > sidecar use and data, ...)
> 
> Well, personally, I wisj the database would go away altogether! :-)
> 
> I want *all* my settings stored with the image files so that I know
> that when I back them up I have saved everytyhing important.  Yes, OK,
> I know others don't want to work that way but I don't think I'm in a
> minority of one!  :-)

That's why there are sidecar files. 

It would probably be possible to do searches (e.g. on keyword) without a 
database. It would just imply a reading of all the images (or sidecars) in the 
selected albums; doable for a few hundred images on a local disk, but some 
here have collections that contain tens of thousands of images on network 
disks.

> > > My expectation (which is the way things are with many programs) is
> > > that the location of the database and of the albums would be set in
> > > the configuration file.  If this isn't so (as it isn't with digikam)
> > > this should be made clear at the beginning of the documentation.
> > 
> > Did you notice the "Album Path=" and "Database File Path=" entries in
> > digikamrc ([Album Settings] section)? Looks like those give the location
> > of
> > the databases (not the names!) and of the album roots (they do on my
> > system...).
> 
> The database path is there but there's no sign of album path in my
> config file.  I'm pretty certain the album paths are stored in the
> database so if they were/are in the config file as well then it will
> cause problems won't it?

The "Album Path" points to the root of my collection, so yeah, the database 
would need to store the rest of the path to a given album. No reason why that 
would cause problems (full path is config root + db path).

But going back to your original problem, if you need to work on a separate and 
temporay collection, and you don't want to pollute your permanent database,
one option could be to create a separate user for work on that tree, and use 
Digikam from there (and possibly other programs). Fresh database and config, 
and not all that hard to switch users on a modern Linux (though you wouldn't 
want to do it every 5 minutes, either). 

And, if all you want to do is *view* a separate tree (as you stated), perhaps 
Digikam isn't the best program to use (Gwenview comes to mind as an easily 
available option if you use KDE, and allows you to show metadata).