[digiKam-users] Synchronizing metadata database -> files modifies files when metadata hasn't changed

[Jonathan Kamens]

As far as I can tell, at least in 7.4.0 (I can't run 7.6.0 because of
shared library problem I emailed about on Friday, speaking of which, I
still haven't seen any guidance on this from any of the digiKam devs
about what to do about that issue, whether I should file a bug or there
is a workaround or whatever), If I use the maintenance tool and tell
digiKam to synchronize metadata from the database to files, it modifies
many image files when the metadata hasn't actually changed. This is
problematic for three reasons: (1) performance; (2) every time you write
to a file there's a chance that it'll get corrupted, so unnecessary
writes should be avhoided; (3) if you back up your images regularly then
a sync is going to cause a new version and therefore a new backup of
basically every image in your collection, which is just terrible.

I just accidentally invoked the maintenance tool meaning to rebuild my
thumbnails without realizing that the sync metadata checkbox was also
checked, and before I realized what was going on over 6,000 files were
modified for no reason.

I checked using exiftool; there are literally no differences in the new
versions of the metadata from in the version in last night's backup.

So now I'm cleaning up over 6,000 modified files to avoiding having to
back them all up tonight, which will unnecessarily cause me to have to
store over 6,000 file revisions in my backup system. Ugh.

It seems clear to me that digiKam shouldn't modified a file in any way,
including its timestamp, if none of the metadata has actually changed
when synchronizing.

  jik

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