I’m not sure this was always the case because I don’t remember running into it until recently. I have a bunch of photos with star ratings, and I’m now trying to edit through them and color-label them for a specific project selections. Every time I apply a label (either by hitting Alt-Ctrl+Number, or via context menu) , it unsets the star rating. I can’t remember for sure, but I think the first time I encountered this, it set it to 2-stars. I say I can’t remember for sure, because I didn’t realize this was going on until I had done a bunch of damage to my image collection and many of the ratings seemed to have been set to 2, but every time I’ve tried to reproduce it, it unsets the stars.
I’m using version 8.7.0 on Arch Linux. I’ve tried doing database maintenance. I tried “Write Metadata to File” for a selection of about 100 images. Incidentally, that also undid a bunch of pick, color, and star labels I had set. I feel like I’m making spaghetti out of my photo collection at this point.
I found that bug report but reloading the digikam.dkamp profile did not fix it. I did however fix it. In Configure → Metadata → Behavior → Write This Information to the Metadata, I checked “Rating.” Previously only Pick Label and Color Label were checked.
It seems like some kind of race condition bug or something where it writes metadata and then immediately reloads the metadata, and whatever is missing in the write gets blown away.
Edit:
I celebrated too soon. There’s some random interaction between Pick label, Color label, and Rating. Setting one will randomly cause one (or both) of the other two to get removed. This is happening so much that it’s making digiKam unsuable to curate my portfolio.
I have a bunch of images with the “Accepted” Pick label. I filter by that label, then I go through rounds of star rating, tighten the filter by increasing the required star rating. This way I progressively trim down the “survivors” each round. But like this bug is causing it to randomly remove the accepted label. Or if I apply a color label it randomly removes the stars and accepted label.