[Kde-imaging] gwenview, digikam, keywords and metadata

[Kristian Rink]

Folks;

just recently switched to KDE after being working with XFCE/Xubuntu for ages. 
While professionally being into software development, I waste pretty much of 
my spare time doing photography and digital imaging, and at first (and second) 
sight, the KDE imaging tools have grown to be _rather_ good. However, at the 
moment there's one thing I am lost a bit, with. 

I have a bunch of images on my store containing EXIF metadata, especially such 
as keywords, ratings, comments. Before switching to KDE, I used shotwell and 
explicitely enforced metadata to be stored along with the images as I run 
different machines and want the metadata to be with the images rather than in 
some isolated, separated database. I usually dump vast loads of images off my 
digital camera storage card into my local Images store and, by them, move 
through these, usually do batch-"classification" (by selecting a bunch of 
images and assigning keywords to them, both keywords which are new and some I 
used before).

In KDE, by now, I have played with dolphin, gwenview, digikam, and though I am 
able to work in this again, there are some questions left nevertheless:


- First off, it took me a while (and actually asking the kde mailing list) to 
figure out which of the applications in KDE is capable of writing metadata 
back to images. Which obviously is digikam, and which obviously does this 
rather good. As stated, I have a load of images bearing EXIF keywords, and 
digikam manges to work with them pretty easily.

- However, in my "standard" setup, all keywords, ratings, ... assigned to 
images in digikam do not appear in the file information in dolphin or in 
gwenview. Mostly, this is a bit uncomfortable as it seems inconsistent. I 
already tried setup digikam to sync its metadata with nepomuk but this doesn't 
seem to do what I want.

- Worse: Though digikam is brilliant in many respects, it falls short compared 
to gwenview in quickly (i.o.w. mainly using just the keyboard and keybindings) 
assigning many (old and new) keywords to many (selected) images. So usage-wise 
I'd at the moment prefer gwenview, but then I am left with having no obvious 
way of how to get comments and keywords stored to the actual images as 
digikam, at least that's what the configuration page says, at best just 
imports nepomuk metadata yet doesn't store it to image files.

So to ask: How do you handle such things? Is there any way of quickly adding 
keywords, comments, ratings to many images in a way so that this information 
is both (a) visible to all KDE applications and (b) stored inside the image 
files, too?

TIA and all the best,
Kristian