Deleted people tags reappearing

[Andrew Goodbody]

On 25/11/2024 01:45, Nadine Helkenn wrote:
> I've been encountering an issue with people tags that I created log ago 
> (and have deleted or changed) showing up again after 'find new items' 
> scans. In some cases the tag hierarchy has been lost so they show up 
> immediately under the 'people' tag. And other times the hierarchy is 
> recreated under an old tag that has been changed.

I am going to make a guess that you write the metadata to the image 
files, yes?

I think this is what happens.

1. You create and apply some tags to images. This writes the metadata to 
the database and the image files.

2. Some time later you edit the tags hierarchy by moving, renaming or 
deleting tags. This updates the database. It does not update the 
metadata in the image files.

3. 'Find new items' scans the file tree and finds tags in the image 
files' metadata that is not present in the database and adds it back to 
the database.

This is definitely behaviour that is less than ideal. You may even 
consider it to be a bug and if so you should log it at https://bugs.kde.org/

To avoid this issue I do the following when I want to edit the tags 
hierarchy and keep the database and files in sync.

1. Use the left sidebar to select all files that have the tag I want to 
edit.
2. Apply a unique and temporary tag to all those files.
3. Remove the tag to be edited from all selected files.
4. Make the desired changes to that tag in the hierarchy.
5. Select all files with the temporary tag applied in 2.
6. Apply the edited tag to all selected files.
7. Remove temporary tag from the files.

Use at your own risk. Test the procedure first on a small number of 
files ie 1 or 2. Backup everything first. Back it up again somewhere else.

Andrew