[digiKam-users] Organizing photos on multiple Digikam installations and with NAS

[Casey Finnerty]

I could use some help on setting up Digikam to use on multiple computers. I
would like the best solution to accommodate the following parameters:

   - I'd like to use Digikam to organize and edit photos contained on local
   hard drives on a Mac, Windows, and two Linux computers I use. Some of these
   computers are laptops that are used occasionally where there is no internet
   available, so local management is essential.
   - I would also like to use Digikam to organize and edit photos contained
   on a NAS drive also. I have not yet purchased one, but I am looking at
   purchasing a Synology Diskstation soon.

In the past, I haved used Digikam on multiple computers to access local and
remote collections, but I maintained separate databases on each computer. I
made sure to write metadata to each image, both jpeg and raw files. (Just
how experimental is the latter, btw?). If data was written to photos on
shared hard drives, I would rescan the directories with updated photos to
update the local Digikam database.

I would prefer to maintain a single Digikam database that I could share
across computers/installations. Is this possible? What would be the best
way to set this up?

I saw this article
<https://scribblesandsnaps.wordpress.com/2018/10/19/use-digikam-with-a-nas-and-mariadb/>
about migrating the Digikam database to MariaDB on a NAS, but the process
looks complicated and comments suggest it slows down performance
noticeably. Also, this would not work for those installations where I
sometimes work offline.

I saw this video <https://youtu.be/LRDaj7rP2_E>, where Nigel Danson is
keeping his photos on a NAS, but he keeps his Lightroom thumbnail database
on an external SSD that he can move from one computer to another, so he can
work on his photos from multiple computers. This would seem to be an ideal
solution for me, yet, in the Digikam manual, I read "For performance and
technical reasons, you cannot use removable media.
<https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/digikam-doc/digikam/using-setup.html>" Is
this still true for the latest versions of Digikam?

If so, I would then appreciate hearing an alternative solution. Thanks.
-- 
Casey M. Finnerty, Ph. D., MB(ASCP)
Winona, MN
USA
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