How to set up albums?

Software digiKam
1

On my ssd the photos are organised by year and date.

When I started digikam I set the album to the top level directory of my photos. However, it seemed to take several hours to load into the digikam database and to update the database when I’ve changed the files outside of digikam. (At least that’s what I assume it was doing.) So I’ve deleted that album and now I’m setting up individual albums for each year of photos.

Is this what I should have been doing all along? Can I easily search all albums or have I messed up?

Another question since I’m having a bit of trouble with digikam. I’ve read how good it is but its taking me a long time to figure out how to use it. I know there’s documentation but that seems very technical and some of it is over my head. I’m wondering if there a separate user guide available, for newbies (and simpletons).

2

Hi,

as a previous Lightroom user, I didn’t have too much trouble getting used to DigiKam’s features.

You don’t need to create an album for each year.

In DigiKam, you can set the root album to the main folder where all your photos are stored.

Each year will be a sub-album of the root.
The folder structure is therefore as follows

  • photography (root folder)
    – 2030
    — 2030-12-30
    — 2030-12-31
    – 2031
    — 2031-01-01
    — 2031-01-02

and so on

The initial creation took a little time during the first import (about 45,000 photos and as many .xmp files), but it wasn’t excessive either. The PC fans blew a little, a sign that it was working hard inside.

Since then, I no longer move my files out of digiKam. I develop them with ART, everything runs smoothly.

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3

Thank you for the info. I don’t think my computer would be causing the extraordinary slow performance when setting up or updating the database. It must be something in the choices I made when setting up digiKam.

(I’ll wait till I’ve cleaned up my photo files and keywords/tags a bit more before trying digiKam again. I suspect part of the problem is that digiKam doesn’t like changes made outside digiKam, and chokes.)

4

I’ve now uninstalled and reinstalled digiKam and it only took about 20 minutes to import the files to the digiKam database instead of hours.

I think the problems I’ve been having are because when I uninstalled and reinstalled digiKam previously, I didn’t uninstall all the files despite trashing files I knew about as well as using Windows uninstall. The previous db remained, or a cache of some type.

I found a post on another forum that described where some of the remnant files were, so I deleted them as well. When I did the reinstall I was told that I still hadn’t picked them all up. There were some stray files elsewhere on the computer. That is, uninstall doesn’t completely uninstall and there are bits of digiKam left in odd places.

All seems to be working now, so that’s a good thing. I will explore the app to see if it suits my needs. Hopefully I won’t mess up this time.

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