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.
Okay. I checked an image with hierarchical keywords added by darktable. It uses the LR schema.
Via the exiv2 cli:
Xmp.lr.hierarchicalSubject vegan|sushi|haruzame