New digikam user - questions/comments

[Gilles Caulier]

Le dim. 15 juin 2025 à 06:30, Rajesh Varadarajan <rajeshvar at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
> I've started using digikam 8.6.0 on linux (fedora 42) over the last 2 weeks, really impressed with how mature it is.

Thanks...

>I experienced a couple of issues/and have a couple of questions, but I could not find a specific answer in the archives (at least in >2025).
>
> 1) Once an import is complete, is there a way for me to look at a log file to see what happened in the last import. Better still, a running log show the import process will also be useful.

There is a small log view in the import tool. Look at the option
View/Show History

https://docs.digikam.org/en/menu_descriptions/menu_importtool.html#the-view-menu

>
> 2) I have a Canon EOS R6 camera and I imported the photos/videos using the USBC connection from the R6 to the linux fedora laptop. The SD card filesystem is formatted as an ex fat --  some video files are > 4G, however, fedora 42 uses the gphoto2 PTP interface and all files > 4G (typically large video files) show as size 0. digikam did not give any notifications or popup information about the import warning me of size 0 file imports, it will be nice for digikam to give this notice in BOLD -- so that less attentive users don't nuke their photos/videos thinking that their import was successful.
>
> My understanding is that this limitation is to do with the 32 bit limit size field in the PTP protocol, is there a way to get around this and continue to use the PTP. The alternative is to pull the SD card out and use an SD card reader and as long as it is mounted as ex FAT, the file size seems appropriate and the import went ok.

Yes, it's probably a limitation (and mostly a bug) in the gphoto2
driver. Uses a USB SD card reader instead of the camera/Gphoto2.

Note : it's not a limitation of exFat which supports files of >4Gb.

https://github.com/gphoto/gphoto2/issues/526


>
> 3) I also have some DJI footage and the video's from here are not playing (4k HEV?) -- what packages do I need in linux to make this work?

ffmpeg + libde265 support. as HEV format is patented, this codec is
not included in standard ffmpeg.

You can use the AppImage bundle that we provided, this one is included.

>
> 4) As I am a bit paranoid about losing photos/videos, I'd like to have a script that runs a hash function like md5 on the photo/video on my SD card and verify that the image with the appropriate hash exists in the sqlite3 db of digikam. However, I don't see the specific hash function being documented. The hash value in the Images sqlite3 table does not seem to be md5. What algorithm is being used and can a user run this hash algorithm on an image outside of the UI? This would improve the fidelity of the import at least in my mind. I'm sure other advanced users would appreciate this.

The digiKam database, for performance reasons, does not compute an MD5
sum over the whole files, but only on the Exif bytearray, to identify
the changed files on the media. Typically the metadata for a speedup
reading are mostly written on the first chuck of the files and when a
file is changed, the metadata is also updated.

https://invent.kde.org/graphics/digikam/-/blob/master/core/libs/dimg/dimg_metadata.cpp?ref_type=heads#L22

>
> 5) In step 2 above, when I first imported using PTP (and > 4G files were missing) and then later switched to importing using the SD card, all the photos/videos were duplicated with _v1 suffixed to the duplicates. So, what is the method that digikam uses to determine if a photo is new or not. I selected the Download new in the 2nd import using the SD card.

It uses the same algorithm as point 4/ to identify the file already
registered in the database.

Best

Gilles Caulier