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

[Chris Green]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2019 at 02:51:42PM +0100, Remco Viëtor wrote:
> 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:
> > 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.
> 
I have over 30000 images.

> > > > 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).
> 
There is simply no "Album Path" in my config file.

> 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). 
> 
Yes, I did consider doing that actually but it feels 'wrong' somehow.
It also means I can't see both at the same time on the same desktop
which is sometimes useful.


> 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).
> 
No, I want to tag things in a useful (and consistent) way, digikam is
good at this.

-- 
Chris Green