[digiKam-users] Renaming lots of photo filenames (using convmv). Best practice?

[Jens Benecke]

Hello,

I noticed that my library has quite a number of photos with broken 
umlauts due to some UTF-8 name mangling, and that I can fix this using 
the 'convmv' tool which was introduced in Linux when UTF-8 became the 
standard encoding everywhere. It automatically detects filenames with 
invalid encodings and renames them to the correct form.

But I am a little hesitant to rename >>100 photos using this tool.

What will Digikam do with the metadata when the photos are renamed? All 
images have tags and ratings, many have descriptions and titles.
Will I leave orphaned entries in the database?
Will the image metadata be kept and applied to the renamed files?
Do I need to (or should I?) let Digikam run in the background while 
renaming so it can detect the change in the file system?

I use XMP sidecars for all files which then will also be renamed. Do 
these contain all metadata?

There are too many files to be renamed to do it manually within Digikam 
(that would take hours) so that is not an option.

How should I proceed?

-- 
Regards, Jens