[digiKam-users] digiKam for long term management of a large library

[Jason Boxman]

There's no change to the JPG or TIFF files themselves. (Assuming you've
configured digiKam to not update the original files; I have all my images
set to read-only on the file system and never modify them in any way ever
again.) The sidecar file is just an XML file with the tags and other
metadata that you apply from within digiKam. The only difference is digiKam
is configured to write metadata to them in addition to the digiKam database
itself. So, you can actually delete the database itself, create a new one,
and digiKam can read the metadata such as tags from the sidecar files and
repopulate your digiKam database. That's as future proof as it gets, I
think.

On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 8:43 PM Michael Moore <stuporglue at gmail.com> wrote:

> Interesting. Most of my photos are just jpg (camera photos) or tiff
> (scanned images), so I'm not sure if xmp is right for me. I saw your other
> post and it looks like a great solution for raw files though.
>
> Thanks,
> Michael
>
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2021, 18:57 Jason Boxman <jasonb at edseek.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>> I can't speak to your other questions, but I'd enable .xmp sidecar files.
>> Because XMP is a standard, if you need to you can always migrate to a
>> different photo management system. I commit my .xmp files into a `git`
>> repository and then sync that to a backup drive.
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 12:44 AM Michael Moore <stuporglue at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I have about 240,000 photos that I'd like to manage with digiKam. I'm
>>> especially interested in the tagging capabilities. I'm comfortable setting
>>> up the remote MySQL server. I like digiKam, and I want to use the facial
>>> recognition to help organize these some more.
>>>
>>> I have a few questions before I just go for it:
>>>
>>> 1. With remote MySQL can multiple users share the same database?
>>>
>>> My wife and I have separate accounts on a Linux desktop machine, and we
>>> would both like to be able to access the library.
>>>
>>> 2. Can the library be accessed from a separate computer?
>>>
>>> If I set up NFS and use the MySQL remote, can I also view the library
>>> from a separate computer?
>>>
>>> Or will the different paths (due to being mounted via NFS) break things?
>>>
>>> 3. What's the best way to future-proof my library?
>>>
>>> After I've tagged and organized my photos I don't want to do it again.
>>>
>>> Is the best practice to write tags to the files, or to dump MySQL as
>>> plain text, or something else? I'd like to ensure that if something
>>> surpasses digiKam in 10 years, that I'll still have my tags.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Michael
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> --
>> Jason Boxman
>> jasonb at edseek.com | 407-212-7877 (mobile)
>> in: http://linkedin.com/in/jboxman
>>
>>

-- 
Jason Boxman
jasonb at edseek.com | 407-212-7877 (mobile)
in: http://linkedin.com/in/jboxman
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