tags make me crazy

[Frédéric Da Vitoria]

Hello,

I have been using digiKam for more than a year now, I am currently using 
8.5.0 on Windows 11. For a few days, I have been fighting my tags.

I use hierarchical tags. For the hierarchy root tags I'll use the french 
names (Lieux instead of Places and Personnes instead of People), since 
this is what digiKam suggested first when I installed it years ago.

All my issues concern 3 subsets of my photos and seem related to 3 places:
- 340 photos taken over several years at a specific place. The complete 
hierarchy should be "Lieux/France/Yonne/C(...)/L(...)/Les T(...)" (I 
have shortened the names, the actual ones are a longer).
- 107 photos taken over several years at 
"Lieux/France/B(...)/S(...)/marché de noël". There is a e acute and a 
diaeresis here, but no special character in the path to the first group 
of photos, so I guess this is not the cause of my problems.
- 135 photos taken over several years at a third place, 
"Lieux/France/C(...)/L(...)/piscine", no special character here either.

I first noted that I had a few tags which weren't where I expected them 
since they were at the root level. IIRC those were "L(...)" and "Les 
T(...)". Some Personnes (People) tags were duplicated too, and the 
duplicated people tags were only from people which appeared on those 
photos.

At that time, I did not check whether those were duplicates or not. I 
tried to fix those tags by checking the correct tags and unchecking the 
wrong ones. I started with the people tags, but they kept reappearing. 
Then I tried with the places tags and the same happened, but it got 
worse: the "France" tag started to appear at root level too. Then 
"L(...)" and "Les T(...)" started to appear at other places under 
"Lieux/France/"

I tried doing it photo by photo and doing it after selecting a batch of 
photos, same results. When by chance it got better on one tag, another 
started to go crazy.

At one point, I wondered if this wasn't an issue with the size of the 
tags. So I shortened the hierarchy to: "Lieux/France/Yonne/Les T(...)". 
It kept happening but stopped getting worse and little by little I 
managed to almost fix the first group of photos: I only had one "Les 
T(...)" tag at root level, "containing" 340 photos. At that point I 
found a solution: I dragged the "Les T(...)" over the "Yonne" tag and 
this succeeded.

For the second group of photos, as for the first one, manually checking 
and unchecking the tags did not work. But merging the tags did work.

For the third group, unfortunately, nothing worked, not even merging the 
tags. Actually, in a way it got worse (but more consistent), the 
"piscine" tag now is on 570 photos, just like 
"Lieux/France/C(...)/L(...)/piscine". I guess that in all the photos 
which had "Lieux/France/C(...)/L(...)/piscine", some were correct, but 
that when I asked dK to merge the tags, it actually propagated the wrong 
tag to all the photos of the group.

I checked: all the 107 photos in the second group had actually 2 tags, 
one full length and one short. I believe this was also true for the 
first group of photos. And this is still true for the photos with 
"piscine". My database contains currently more than 24 000 photos, most 
of them are tagged, with often quite a few tags on each photo, but this 
problem only concerns these groups of photos. I also checked the file 
attributes, none are read-only.

One thing which is probably relevant: When I try a merge I see the count 
of photos from the "piscine" tag going down then up again.

I still have the 135 "piscine" photos waiting to be fixed, so if anyone 
wants me to do some tests...

-- 
Frédéric Da Vitoria