Hi all,
I too have now encountered the problem of the digiKam face tags and their associated pararphrenalia - smiley faces, for example - and the inability to remove them.
It is already perfectly obvious to anyone who uses digiKam that face recognition is NOT a mandatory feature or activity and many users, myself included, never use it nor would ever wish to. Thus when we re-start digiKam we are presented with a box in which we are told that digiKam must have the proposed download files in order for face recognition to work. We also have a cancel button, but along with its use comes a âveiled threatâ that next time we re-start we will be faced (what a terrible pun!) with the same problem all over again.
Now we know that digiKam will work perfectly well in every other respect if we hit the cancel button, but we know too that we will have to go on clicking âcancelâ for the rest of our lives! Other commenters (in a bug report on this issue) have suggested that the feature ought simply to be disabled, and I agree: if we donât want to use it we ought not to be forced or coerced into doing anything - even something as seemingly trivial as hitting a cancel button. A âDonât show this againâ kind of thing would do nicely.
But there is a deeper and more worrying idea at work here, and nobody seems to be aware of it, or at least nobody has yet drawn attention to it. The files of which digiKam itself consist are the property of their originators and we are given licence to use them to do those things which we want the software to do. To reject them merely because we donât like or want them would be silly in the extreme. So we quietly accept that they are there, part of the download, and we thereafter ignore them. However, installing tags via that same download which are then written into our tagsâ databases is quite another matter. The tags and their databases are mine and mine alone. Nobody has any right to iterfere with them without my express permission which, I hasten to add, nobody will ever get.
Just as the proprietary files which comprise digikKam are the sole and exclusive property of those propietors, so too the files we generate - tags are but one example - are ours not digiKamâs or anyone elseâs. We are the creators and the owners in every respect of these files, and it is intolerable that anyone dares to interfere with them, and particularly in a manner that prevents us from regaining rightful control by deleting these unwanted, unwarrented intrusions into our private files and property. It is a thin edge of a wedge which, if allowed to go unchallenged, will end up in our being told what pictures we may take or not being allowed to delete those we have taken but no longer wish to keep just because someone on a faraway development team dictates that they are âessentialâ to some function or other which we donât use in any case. It need hardly be said that no-one supposes there is any malicious intent behind all this: the notion that developers of the best software most of us are ever likely to see are trying to take over our files for some nefarious purpose is so ludicrous as to be beneath contempt: it is a simple human error, no more, no less; but having said that much I reiterate that I have strong feelings against it being done at all. There must be other ways to accommodate those who do want face recognition, a simple âopt in/ opt outâ kind of thing. And while I am thinking on it, there are better places to put those recognition tags than directly in a private userâs database files. They would be far more useful displayed directly on the face recognition page / screen, I would think.
Let me be clear: I do not use, nor do I ever wish to use, face recognition or any of its associated functions. My tags tree includes many images of people, but that is my private business and it is not ethical or proper for any third party to effectively ransack my files and insert their own entries against my wishes. I hope I have thus clarified the problem: digiKam files are digiKamâs business and I donât interfere with them save to interact with them according to the licene terms. My files are my business, and I expect the same respect for my property as I readily acknowledge is the entitlement of digiKamâs proprieors in respect of theirs.
digikKam has a moral and ethical responisibility which is simple and clear: make available, at the earliest possible opportunity, a simple and effective means for me (and others) to remove these intruders from our private files and banish them forever⌠or welcome them back if we so wish!
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