[digiKam-users] Rescanning complete collection because disk was accidentally not mounted

[Jens Benecke]

Hello all,

I am running the current Digikam 2023-01-05 appimage on KDE Neon (Ubuntu 
22.04 based).

I have symlinked one subdirectory of my collection to a second harddisk 
because of disk space.

Just now, I started Digikam once without this disk being mounted. After 
closing it, mounting the disk and then restarting Digikam, it started 
rescanning the whole collection (~350 GB of photos). It is still ongoing 
and will probably take an hour or so.

My questions:

1.) Is there a risk of me losing metadata? I am creating only sidecar 
files, everything else is just in the Digikam DB.
      Image files are never modified.

2.) Can I avoid this forced rescan somehow, without having to create a 
dedicated "removable disk" collection for this subdirectory?
      Or is this exactly the use case for which collections on removable 
disks were intended?

3.) If I decide to make this folder a removable disk collection, will I 
lose metadata by redefining it as such in Digikam?

Thanks for any advice!


-- 
Regards, Jens