Efficient photo tagging with digikam

[system]

By Peter Albrecht.

In the two years that I'm using digikam by now, I always searched for a way to tag the persons on my
photos in a fast and easy way. Now I discovered a fast way of tagging with the keyboard only.

== A) The batch-click way:

Having read the digikam handbook back in 2009 and using the tools, I saw evolve in the GUI, I ended
up with the following way:

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.digikam.org/news/2012-01-21_efficient_photo_tagging_with_digikam/

[Andrius]

Hello, I have tried to use the method “B” on digiKam 5.5.0 but it did not work as described.

1 select an album
2 switch to “view image”-view (the bigger the picture, the better you can recognize the people, you want to tag)
3 switch the right sideview to “Caption/Tags” and select tab “Tags”
4 click in the uppermost input box, which shows the text: “Enter new tag here…”
5 look for the leftmost person, you have not tagged yet
6 start typing a few letters of the desired tagname (You have to start with the first letters in your
tag name. There is no “mid word matching”.)
-> you will see a list of possible tags appear that shrinks with every letter you add to the input box

Everything works until the next step.

7 if the list is reduced enough, use TAB to select the desired tag from this list

Pressing TAB brings me to the tags search field at the bottom of Tags Tree.

8 hit ENTER to assign this tag to your picture

Nothing happens after that. I tried pressing SPACE too.

9 if there are more persons, you want to tag, go to step 5 again
10 if all persons on this image have been tagged, hit PAGE_DOWN to go to the next image and
resume with step 5

PAGE DOWN does not work neither from the “enter tag here” box nor from the tags search box. (“from” means that the cursor is currently in that field). It does work if I click on the tags tree first but now the method is not keyboard only anymore.

Keyboard focus will always stay in the tag input box. So you can keep your hands on the keyboard all the time and tag very fast.

This did not work either.

Can someone to take a look at this and let me know if there is something I am doing wrong here?

[BuckSkin]

@system

This way you go through all your pictures. In the beginning you have to tag a lot of people, but coming to the last pictures, most people will already be tagged and you can fast jump to the next picture.

I just now found and read this; thanks for posting it.

The first section describes a method that is pretty much identical to the way I have been handling large groups of images that need tagging and it works very well; however, in my case, very few of my subjects are people.

Some time ago, when I discovered XnView64 IPTC templates could have hierarchical digiKam tags saved in them, that revelation alone has revolutionized the bulk of my tagging.