[digiKam-users] Keyword import issue

[Frédéric Da Vitoria]

Hello,

I recently switched to digiKam and I am experiencing a strange issue 
with keywords.

First of all, I am using digiKam 7.5.0 in French and translating some 
things back to English in this post, so the exact words I will use could 
be wrong.

I have more than 22 000 files. Most of them were tagged with keywords 
using a Windows software, FotoAlbum. I loaded my files in digiKam and 
was pretty much happy with the results. Some things will have to be 
sorted out but I haven't found anything major except for one thing:

818 files were loaded with keyword ")". I tried to find some relation 
between those, but could not find any. Some pics were tagged with 
keywords containing characters, but some not, some use keywords with 
more than one word, most don't, and some pics use only the simple 
keyword "ciel" (one word, no accent...). As much as I can tell, when 
digiKam thinks a picture has the ")" keyword, digiKam does not see any 
other keyword in this picture.

I examined pictures with only the keyword "ciel". I chose this keyword 
because it is one word and does not have any accented characters and I 
have a few pictures with only this keyword. I used a binary level tool 
to check a file with the strange ")" keyword and a file in which digiKam 
correctly sees "ciel" and both have the sequence 63 69 65 6C, so I guess 
this is not a character encoding issue. Both exiftool (v 11.93) and 
exiv2 (v 0.25 001900) find the keyword "ciel" in the "correct" file as 
well as in the ")" file. Apart from this, it seems digiKam read metadata 
from the 818 files correctly, at least the dates and times, my name 
(which does contain accented characters) and the camera model are correct.

Speaking of the camera, and this could be the most important : as much 
as I can tell, all ")" pictures were taken using a Canon S5 IS. Most of 
the pictures I took with the S5 IS were correctly loaded in digiKam. I 
did not use Canon software to do the tagging since I used FotoAlbum for 
this, and I've had FotoAlbum long before I got the S5, and long after I 
stopped using it. I had another Canon before, but none of it's pictures 
were in the 818 lot. I have used a Fuji, a Minolta and a Panasonic since 
then too, which were absent from the 818 list as much as I can tell. And 
the 818 lot ranges from 2007 to 2015, which matches the dates when I 
started ans stopped using the S5 IS. So again, I believe all the 818 
pictures were taken with the Canon S5 IS.

Does anyone have an idea about what is going on and more importantly how 
I could fix this ?

-- 
Frédéric Da Vitoria