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

[Jens Benecke]

Hello,

I just tested the current Appimage (of 2025-12-02) and with a restore of 
my digikam4.db from a week ago, things are back to normal again.

Thank you for fixing this bug so quickly and for providing a solution.

Also, to everybody: backup regularly. Really. You never know. 🙂

Jens


Am 02.12.25 um 08:16 schrieb 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!
>
>
>
-- 
Regards, Jens