8.9.0: Digikam keeps rescanning complete collection on each restart & grouped images are gone

[Maik Qualmann]

The problem is now fixed in git/master and will be available in one of the next 
AppImages.

https://invent.kde.org/graphics/digikam/-/commit/
0838075dbb3dd7230a929e3cad56bb6143590046

We introduced a directory cache to minimize repeated scanning of the 
collection. This scanner was not following symbolic links. Thank you for 
reporting the issue.

Maik

Am Montag, 1. Dezember 2025, 23:17:06 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit schrieb 
Jens Benecke:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have been using Digikam on my PC for over 10 years and I'm still happy
> with it. My image collection is now way over 500GB, almost 200'000 files
> altogether, and all this worked fine on an i5-4570 4-core PC from 2013.
> 
> Until last weekend.
> 
> Since having upgraded from the 8.8.0 appimage (beginning of November) to
> 8.9.0 appimage (current), Digikam keeps rescanning my complete default
> collection at /home/jens/Bilder (not the second one, and not one on an
> external drive), which takes about 2 hours since it's about 160.000
> images and 473 GB of data.
> /home/jens/Bilder/Digikam is a symlink to a different drive, but this
> has never been a problem and this drive is permanently mounted, so I
> don't see the problem here.
> 
> Even if I let it finish and exit cleanly, the next time it will again
> rescan the complete collection.
> 
> Also I noticed that my album properties (e.g. album dates) and image
> groupings are gone since this happened the first time.
> 
> What happened here?
> How can I fix this, and - possibly - even restore my image groupings?
> 
> I attached a debug log output (with the Marble log lines removed - too
> many) from starting the appimage on the console - maybe this helps.
> 
> Thank you!