How to fix corrupted database?

[Michael Miller]

Hi Patrick,
Good news!  Your database is fine.

Export this variable and start digiKam from the command line.

 QTWEBENGINE_CHROMIUM_FLAGS=--disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer”

Cheers,
Mike

On May 20, 2025, at 5:43 AM, Patrick Gerlier <page74010-dgkm at yahoo.com> wrote:


Hi all,

Using Digikam 8.6.0 under Fedora 42 with KDE Plasma desktop

I revived a photo archive put on sleep several years ago. Therefore my computer underwent several major upgrades in the mean time, i.e. last time I opened this archive was done under an older release. Digikam crashes in segfault after "Loading albums" step. When launched from the terminal, I get:

digikam.dnnmodelmanager: Cannot find DNN models path
digikam.dnnmodelmanager: Cannot find DNN models path
qt.multimedia.ffmpeg: Using Qt multimedia with FFmpeg version 7.1.1 GPL version 3 or later
digikam.dnnmodelmanager: Cannot find DNN models path
digikam.dnnmodelmanager: Cannot find DNN models path
digikam.dnnmodelmanager: Cannot find DNN models path
kf.xmlgui: Unhandled container to remove :  Digikam::DigikamApp
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

It is very likely that I manipulated the photo directory outside Digikam, because I reconfigured my computer several times.

When I peek into the database, I see many NULL fields in the 'album' column of 'images' table. Some of them correspond to albums I decided to make an independent collection under a separate database (though the images should have also disappeared because the files are no longer present).

I first suspected an issue with removable media which were indexed by Digikam, but this does not seem to be the case. I also questioned the use of UUID in 'albumroots' table because my disks were reformatted and data reloaded "as is" without activating Digikam. I change 'uuid=…' to 'path=…' without effect (I worked on a copy of the DB).

Digikam operates as expected on other databases. I started a separate collection and everything works fine though there are also NULL 'album' columns (in relatively low numbers) despite the fact that the photos where all managed inside Digikam.

I have written a small quick'n'dirty Django-based database browser to see the extent of the damage (within my limited understanding of the DB schema, ignoring tags presently). Surprisingly, my browser displays pictures and data without problem. Note that this browser is purely "passive". It does not try to reconstruct a structure; it only queries the DB in read-only mode, ignoring NULL columns (thus ignoring possible duplicates resulting from external manipulation).

All data seem to be there.

Since the collection holds 10k+ images (and a very sophisticated tree-like tag structure), I'd like to recover the database because it is quite impossible to re-enter data, some of them being the result of time-consuming historical research (XIX century photos) without backup outside Digikam DBs.

Since Digikam segfaults, I can't access the Tools>Maintenance menu command.

How can I proceed?

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/digikam-users/attachments/20250520/3870a4bd/attachment.htm>