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

[John Chan]

I have a collection of around 150K photos and started to use digikam
manage a full copy on a local SSD attached to my Mac laptop. My old
workflow was a to work locally and then sync all my changes to a master
copy on my NAS.

I turned on face tagging and started to update the jpegs with the XML data.
Unfortunately, I didn't realize that my sync would blow up as embedding the
XML in each photo would result in need to recopy the full photo back to the
NAS. I should have gone down the sidecar route given that syncing  txt
files would have been much faster.

I tried directly managing a collection of photos on my NAS from my laptop
but my experience was mixed.  After you generate the thumbnails, browsing
was pretty good but opening the full image tended to vary greatly between
WIFI, NAS contention and some pinwheeling occasionally on digikam. I
haven't tried that setup in the latest builds so I'm curious to see what
other configurations work for everyone else.

-John



On Tue, Feb 9, 2021 at 11:14 AM Henrique Santos Fernandes <
sf.rique at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey,
>
> I am also very interested in Mysql and NFS setup.
>
> I stop using digikam a while back (a few years now)  but I had set
> everything up to sync on files and side card as well.
>
> Currently, I am bringing my storage back up (Freenas)  and will most
> likely access it over NFS. Right now My biggest concern is if I should go
> for MySQL or not, I will also try to use my old digikam database (because
> of videos tagging) too see if I will be able to upgrade it from that old
> version.
>
> Since google photos is not free anymore (i had a pixel) , I will go back
> to manually handle everything and also download all my google photos from
> pixel.
>
> Right Now my library is around 65k pic/videos in the following months I
> will need to have this setup ready and making sure I go with the right
> options is key for me.
>
> As I said Mysql or sqlite is my biggest concern. I believe I will endup
> going with sqlite cause it seems better supported, but i really like the
> idea that any PC could connect to my digikam MySQL and NFS and would be
> able to work as usual.
>
> Regards
>
> []'sf.rique
> Henrique Santos Fernandes
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2021 at 3:15 PM Jason Boxman <jasonb at edseek.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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