[digiKam-users] Further question about saving metadata

[Chris Green]

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 11:21:36AM +0200, Remco Viëtor wrote:
> On jeudi 14 mai 2020 10:32:51 CEST Chris Green wrote:
> > I've started a new thread to make things (a bit) clearer.
> > 
> > I've been thinking about all this and it raises another quite serious
> > question unless I'm completely misunderstanding things.
> > 
> > I'm told that if I tick all the boxes under "Write This Information to
> > the Metadata" section of Dokuwiki's configuration settings then my
> > metadata will be written to the (image) files.
> That seems logical. More precisely, changes for selected files will be written 
> on request, or when selecting another image/album. For now, let's forget about 
> lazy updates.
> 
> > In that case what does the option "Write Metadata to Files" in the
> > Album menu do?
> What it says on the box: it writes metadata to the files from the database 
> right now.
> 
So what data does it write?  Does it write all the metadata or only
the items specified in the Metadata configuration settings?


> > If ticking the boxes in the Metadata configuration means that the data
> > is always written to the files then what does the menu option do? Does
> > it just repeat the writing of the data?  Or does the data *only* get
> > written when you click the menu option with the Metadata configuration
> > settings just saying *which* metadata gets written when you click on
> > the Menu option?
> Have you even done some minimal checking? I've never had to use those menu 
> items, *unless* a file hade been changed outside digikam. That shouldn't  
> happen in my workflow, but mistakes happen (I have checking for changes on 
> startup activated). In all other cases I've checked, metadata were kept 
> synchronised between database and files (including sidecars). 
> 
So if I change a file's metadata outside Digikam and then start
Digikam and click the option "Write Metadata to File" what happens? 
It seems to me likely that Digikam will overwrite the change I have
made because it won't be in Digikam's database.  ...  or will Digikam
have updated its metadata when it loaded (hopefully it will do this)
and then ....  do what?  Nothing I suspect/hope.

-- 
Chris Green