Deleted people tags reappearing

[Maik Qualmann]

If for some reason the metadata cannot be written to certain images, the old 
information will of course be read from the image again and the tag will 
appear again.
It must be clarified why the metadata could not be written.

Maik

Am Montag, 25. November 2024, 21:38:23 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit schrieb 
Nadine Helkenn:
> Currently I am unable to apply ANY tags to ANY images. I continue trying to
> merge tags as well as just add or remove tags from images. It appears to
> work, but moments later, any changes I make just disappear. Tags revert to
> the same status they were before I initiated any changes at all.
> 
> 
> Nadine H
>  
> From: Digikam-users <digikam-users-bounces at kde.org> on behalf of Andrew
> Goodbody <ajg02 at elfringham.co.uk> Sent: Monday, November 25, 2024 1:01 AM
> To: digikam-users at kde.org <digikam-users at kde.org>
> Subject: Re: Deleted people tags reappearing
>  
> 
> 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