[digiKam-users] A question about management across digikam on mac and ios devices

[Bill Allen]

I've got thousands of images that I manage on my mac that I've got 
organized into folders. I've tagged all the images using DigiKam which 
writes those tags to the images themselves. I use an iPhone and iPad and 
would like to share those images on those devices, but as far as I can tell 
the only supported way to do that is to import them into Apple Photos which 
takes over all management from that point on as it loads the photos into 
its own database which 1) isn't accessible by digiKam, 2) basically 
invalidates the folder organization that I've got. I know that Photos on 
the mac allows one to "import" while retaining the file structure, but that 
misses the point since I still won't see those images on the IOS devices 
unless they are actually imported into the Photos DB.

I should note that my folders are all stored on iCloud so in principle 
they're available on IOS via the files application, but that provides no 
ability to search by tags, date, etc. which was the point of tagging and 
dating them in the first place. What I'd love to find is an IOS application 
that "imports" the images from iCloud, which actually leaving them in place 
so if I make edits on the mac, they are there. Needless to say since I'm 
writing this that I haven't found any such application, but I'd love to be 
proven wrong.

The only solution that I've come up with is to basically just give up on 
the notion and export photos from DigiKam to a folder on my mac and import 
them to Apple Photos which will make them available to my IOS devices, but 
not allow for any updating other than an export/import cycle.

I can't imagine that many people have read this far, but if you have and 
have some insight I'm missing I'd love to hear it.