I’ll have to check out the photo management elements in darktable. Can it be used as a lightweight DAM?
I dislike the renaming files part of the workflow. I strongly believe that metadata should take priority, filenames are irrelevant.
My other pet peeve, of course, is that MWG Guidelines seem to be ignored. Again.
In what way are they being ignored? Not sure which thing you’re referring to specifically.
IPTC is specifically mentioned in the workflow, but no mention of following MWG Guidelines to map the differing metadata standards. No offence, as I said it’s just a pet peeve of mine.
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MWG vs JEITA/CIPA. Some parts don’t match, e.g. the comment and description field intentions, causing much trouble, which I’ve reported extensively about in a ping-pong between Exiv2 and digiKam.
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My conclusion is that MWG is what everybody has agreed to do in public. At home, they each still do their own thing.
Is there a link to that discussion? I’d be interested in reading it as I have some minor involvement in both of those projects.
Ah yes, issue 985. I remember that now. My conclusion remains. Adobe is part of the MWG. Through those guidelines, Adobe and the other members agreed that:
Description defines the textual description of a resource's content.
Also known as "user comment”, "caption”, "abstract” or "description”.
Exif ImageDescription, IPTC Caption, and XMP (dc:description) are mapped together.
This makes sense, as the words “description” and “title” are not synonyms. MWG Guidelines are silent on the “title” tag.
I love this guy! He has been quite helpful to me while brushing up on Inkscape.
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I’ll have to check out the photo management elements in darktable. Can it be used as a lightweight DAM?[/quote]
I would say so, though I don’t know much about DAM. You can create collections based on multiple criterion, and tag images. So far I’ve been using tags like ‘person:david’.
I tend to agree.
Let us know if you still feel the same way when you’ve got hundreds if not thousands of duplicate file names among 100,000+ source files, and you have already iterated through more than one way of going about your DAM as the years have rolled by.
Do you know about hierarchical tags? If you are using “person|david” instead of your tag then the tag “david” will be a leaf in a hierarchical tree ”root-person-david”. That way you will be able to filter for all persons or for “david” alone or for the whole path “root-person-david”. The vertical bar “|” is used as separator between branch levels.
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I probably deserved that. I suppose even if duplicate filenames aren’t an issue in storage due to folder structure they could become one when exporting and managing files generally. Anyway, I haven’t even bought and watched the course yet, so I think I’ll give it a go.
I didn’t! Thanks very much for explaining; I’ll be sure to try that out and switch.
I didn’t mean to be aggressive. Sorry if I came across that way.
If you have unique file names, no matter what database system you’re using to manage your DAM, you’re guaranteed to be able to locate a file if you ever happen to need to search by file name. And chances are one day, probably for a reason you don’t anticipate today, you’ll need to do that.
And I say that as an advocate for using metadata, including keywords and good descriptions and titles, to categorize the files in the DAM. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.
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Depending on the hierarchical tag schema used. Some use “|”, others use “/”, others use a complex textual hierarchy.
The vertical bar “|” might be considered a defacto standard as it is what Lightroom uses. Not a problem for open source apps as the LR schema (and the others) are fully supported in exiv2 and exiftool.
Digikam, for example, uses that core functionality to read and write data to/from all the competing hierarchical keyword schemas: LR, MS, MWG, ACDSee …
A valid point perhaps. But with CLI tools able to search all metadata, when would one actually have to search by file name? I am assuming here that the metadata is stored in the image file and/or in an sidecar file, not exclusively in a database.
Let’s assume you are looking for one of your images that you know is somewhere in your image store, but you don’t have the original metadata. What if you can’t recreate in your mind the correct metadata tags with which to search for, and all you have is the original filename or a variant on it?
Or what about the times when you have 50 copies of the same scene & subject, that are similar but not identical, all have the same keywords, and you need the exact one?
I was talking about darktable since @DavidOliver was talking about darktable. I do not know about lightroom, I never used it since I do not own an operating system supported by ligtroom for more than 15 years.
Good to know that digikam understands them all.