[digiKam-users] Migrating from Windows, can Digikam read embedded video tags?

[Will Rose]

Perhaps this is not the right place to ask since it's only partially related to DigiKam, but let's say I wanted to manually use ExifTool to write the HEIC XMP sidecar data back into the file itself, and then delete the sidecar. Is that safe to do? I can't imagine this would confuse DigiKam down the road?

Specifically, I'm looking at the examples on the ExifTool website and there are a couple commands that look promising.

https://www.exiftool.org/metafiles.html

9. Restore all XMP tags from an XMP sidecar file to XMP in a JPG image:
exiftool -tagsfromfile SRC.xmp -all:all DST.jpg

15. Copy XMP from sidecar files back to the same locations in the source files:
exiftool -ext EXT -tagsfromfile %d%f.xmp -all:all -r DIR

I've tried them out successfully in a test folder outside DigiKam, but not inside my main library yet. I'm curious to know whether it will play well with DigiKam. Or maybe I'll just wait for DigiKam to have this built in.

Thanks!



________________________________
From: Digikam-users <digikam-users-bounces at kde.org> on behalf of Gilles Caulier <caulier.gilles at gmail.com>
Sent: January 16, 2022 1:29 AM
To: digiKam - Home Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of open source <digikam-users at kde.org>
Subject: Re: [digiKam-users] Migrating from Windows, can Digikam read embedded video tags?

yes.

digiKam has a maintenance tool to sync file metadata with digiKam database. As all tags are always written to the database outside the fact to manage or not XMP sidecar (optional), you will be able later to update HEIF metadata with digiKam tags.

Best

Gilles Caulier

Le dim. 16 janv. 2022 à 06:26, Will Rose <will.rose at outlook.com<mailto:will.rose at outlook.com>> a écrit :
That's good to know, thanks.

If I go through now and tag a bunch of new HEIC files in digiKam, and that metadata gets written to a sidecar, will there be an easy way to copy the sidecar data back into the image once the HEIC write feature becomes available? If not, I'm just wondering if I should hold off on creating new tags if I'm just going to have to do it again later.

Thanks for all your help!
________________________________
From: Digikam-users <digikam-users-bounces at kde.org<mailto:digikam-users-bounces at kde.org>> on behalf of Gilles Caulier <caulier.gilles at gmail.com<mailto:caulier.gilles at gmail.com>>
Sent: January 16, 2022 1:15 AM
To: digiKam - Home Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of open source <digikam-users at kde.org<mailto:digikam-users at kde.org>>
Subject: Re: [digiKam-users] Migrating from Windows, can Digikam read embedded video tags?

Hi,

For the moment, HEIC still in read only about metadata. We plan to use ExifTool to deal with this format. It's not yet implemented.

You can use XMP sidecar with digiKam instead.

Gilles Caulier

Le dim. 16 janv. 2022 à 05:43, Will Rose <will.rose at outlook.com<mailto:will.rose at outlook.com>> a écrit :
Hi Gilles,

Unfortunately, based on what I am seeing from ExifTool, Microsoft is not writing to the file metadata for those HEIC face tags. I might have to go back and re-tag those files.

However, if I do add tags or face regions to an HEIC file in Digikam, at the moment it is writing to an external XMP file instead of embedding the metadata like it would for a JPG. Is it possible to force Digikam to embed the data in the HEIC? I know the newer versions of ExifTool can write to HEIC.

Thanks!
________________________________
From: Digikam-users <digikam-users-bounces at kde.org<mailto:digikam-users-bounces at kde.org>> on behalf of Gilles Caulier <caulier.gilles at gmail.com<mailto:caulier.gilles at gmail.com>>
Sent: January 16, 2022 12:09 AM
To: digiKam - Home Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of open source <digikam-users at kde.org<mailto:digikam-users at kde.org>>
Subject: Re: [digiKam-users] Migrating from Windows, can Digikam read embedded video tags?

hi,

the Q is : where is stored this information set by the Microsoft application?

- in a database = we cannot extract it
- in XMP sidecar = we must be able to extract it
- in file metadata = we  must be able to extract it

About HEIF : yes we support this format, including metadata.

To be sure, share samples to be sure and test.

Best

Gilles Caulier


Le dim. 16 janv. 2022 à 02:12, Will Rose <will.rose at outlook.com<mailto:will.rose at outlook.com>> a écrit :
I just realized as well that Digikam won't read any face tags added by Windows to any of my wife's many iPhone images which are now in HEIC format. I don't suppose Digikam is able to read/write embedded tags for this popular format?

________________________________
From: Digikam-users <digikam-users-bounces at kde.org<mailto:digikam-users-bounces at kde.org>> on behalf of Will Rose <will.rose at outlook.com<mailto:will.rose at outlook.com>>
Sent: January 15, 2022 7:11 PM
To: digiKam - Home Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of open source <digikam-users at kde.org<mailto:digikam-users at kde.org>>
Subject: Re: [digiKam-users] Migrating from Windows, can Digikam read embedded video tags?

I'm not sure I understand. I'll re-explain my situation and try to clarify my problem.

Since about 2006 I've used Windows Photo Gallery to organize and tag my photos and videos. I'm trying to move away from it since it's long deprecated software and Digikam is where I want to go (right now using 7.4.0 on Windows 10).

Problem is, I have lots of old videos that have been tagged from inside Windows Photo Gallery (WMV, MPG, MOV, MP4). Let's say I tagged a bunch of videos as "travel". If I want to search for those videos in Windows Photo Gallery I can just search that term and it will find everything with that tag. I can also find them from Windows Explorer since from what I can tell the tags are embedded in the video file, except for maybe the few MPGs I have. However, if I open up Digikam and search for "travel" none of those videos show up. Ideally I would be able to read those old tags from inside Digikam because at some point I'll get rid of the old Windows Photo Gallery software. I could instead just search in Windows Explorer, but I just realized that it won't find my Digikam-tagged video files because it's not searching the contents of the XMP sidecar file. So at the moment there is not one place I can search from and get all the tag results I want.


________________________________
From: Digikam-users <digikam-users-bounces at kde.org<mailto:digikam-users-bounces at kde.org>> on behalf of Gilles Caulier <caulier.gilles at gmail.com<mailto:caulier.gilles at gmail.com>>
Sent: January 15, 2022 5:50 PM
To: digiKam - Home Manage your photographs as a professional with the power of open source <digikam-users at kde.org<mailto:digikam-users at kde.org>>
Subject: Re: [digiKam-users] Migrating from Windows, can Digikam read embedded video tags?

Hi,

Yes, the video tags will be readable under Windows. In background it's ffmpeg C API used to parse video file metadata.

In the future, we will use exifTool instead. It will be more powerful.

Best

Gilles Caulier

Le sam. 15 janv. 2022 à 22:23, Will Rose <will.rose at outlook.com<mailto:will.rose at outlook.com>> a écrit :
I've been a long time user of Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Photo Gallery because it was the easiest program to use to embed tags inside image and video files.

I followed the Digikam Windows compatibility guide and though it works great for photos, I don't see much for videos. I have a lot of old WMV, MPG, and MOV files that have been tagged using Photo Gallery. The tags show up in the interface as "Descriptive Tags", and also show up in Windows Explorer as "Tags" if I check the file properties, but nothing shows up in Digikam. If I try to add tags to those files with Digikam, they write to external XMP files. Is there a way to get Digikam to write or at least read those Windows-embedded video tags? If I can at least get it to read, I can search for those old tags with Digikam if I'm looking for something specific that I've tagged in the past 15 years. Going forward, writing is less important, though ideally I would also like to write to these files.

Thanks.
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