I relaunched my long abandoned effort to tag all my photos. Was mostly done before, but now have gone back to clean things up and finalize it all. Of course there have been several updates to both pieces of software since then - and I am far from an in depth user.
darktable 4.8.1
digiKam 8.4.0
DK does write to the XMP file, but dt does not see the new/changed tags, unless I delete the image, and import it again. I did enable “look for updated xmp files on startup”.
DK does see changes that I make in dt - so it is working in that direction.
Is it broken - or (more likely) am I deficient in setup or comprehension?
Thank you boredphoto! It was the checkbox in DigiKam to “update File modification timestamp” that was missing. dt didn’t detect that the file was modified since it was last used. Checking that box, they both synch changes upon opening.
That is why I don’t use digiKam to catalog my images. Well, that and the fact that digiKam brings in eight tons of infrastructure that I don’t use.
It’s fine. For a user who does not use it, there are others who do. Digikam is an excellent DAM with many features that are often found the other professional software. For managing metadata and searching images quickly it is great. Coupled with darktable I have a complete image management and development system.
As a very casual user of darktable, I just needed to deal with tagging a lot of images, including reworking the previous tag schema I had used. For day-to-day use, dt does what I need. But to get to that point, I was looking for something with a little more oomph to the management tools, which digiKam seems to fulfill. But I don’t see myself bouncing between the two on any regular basis.