Import Photos in digiKam

Software digiKam
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Using the commands tucked under the Import menu, you can offload photos from your camera, storage card, or USB stick directly into the application. What's more, the Import dialog box offers a few clever features that allow you to configure the import operation. Continue to read

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.digikam.org/news/2011-06-27_import_photos_in_digikam/
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It’s just a bit strange…
Select ‘Import’ menu, then ‘add folders’ and ‘Pictures’ for my main archived picture collection.

Then Digikam appears to expect me to have a ‘destination album’ to import folders into… I don’t actually want them moved, I just want them imported to the database…

So there’s some logic at play here I don’t grasp.

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Digikam uses the concept of “collections” and “albums”. A collection is basically a directory on a hard disk, with albums as subdirectories. All images that digikam handles have to be in a collection.

So “importing” means copying files from outside the collection(s) to a place inside a collection. If you already have your images where you want them, and you don’t want to move them, you have two options:

  • either the images are in a part of the directory tree designated as a collection, then you should tell digikam to look for new images (“Tools” menu, item “scan for new items” or “maintenance”);
  • or the images are elsewhere, and you want to leave them there, then you’ll have to designate that directory (or a parent) as a collection, perhaps followed by making digikam look for new images.

In your case, if you are just starting to use digikam, the easiest solution could be to just make your main picture collection a “digikam collection” (“Settings” menu, “Collections” in left column).

Import is mainly aimed at importing images from external devices (camera’s, card readers…)

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Welcome to digiKam.
I will agree that digiKam’s way of operation is quite weird compared to anything else one may be used to; it doesn’t help that what something is called in one place is called something completely different in another.

I have been using digiKam for years and I still get confused at times.

In Settings, physical locations/folders on your hard-drive are called “Collections” ; however, those “Collections” show up as “Albums” in the left pane of the main page.
In this regard, Collections and Albums are exactly the same thing and both are simply physical locations/folders contained on your hard-drives.

The peculiar thing about digiKam, as compared to most anything else, is the complete lack of a navigateable folder tree where one can scroll through and select where they wish digiKam to be; instead, any folder on one’s hard-drives must first be entered as a Collection in Settings.

Myself, I do not want every version and format of all of my many thousands of images to show up every time I hunt for something; I only want to ever see either the completely finished version, or those in the process of having information added and being keyword tagged.

So, for every folder of finished jpegs, I have a Collection/Album entered in Settings > Collections ; plus, when I am still adding metadata and information to images and keyword tagging and editing them, I enter their working folder (and thus all of it’s subfolders) as a Collection; and, when I have finished adding all the information and editing, I delete this working Collection.

Thus, when I click a keyword tag in the left pane Tags menu, I am not inundated with fifty versions of the same image, but only the single finished version — unless that image is in an unfinished working Collection, in which case it will show up.

I hope I haven’t confused the issue further.

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Well, the idea is that you have the root directory of your image collection as a Digikam “collection”, and your images in subdirectories (“albums”) of that root. If you do that, each collection shows up as a navigateable tree…

If you indeed make each set of photos in itself a collection, you get into a hard to maintain mess…

when you decide an image is finished,

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That’s all well and good until I click on a specific tag and it brings up seventeen tagged versions of the same image, multiplied by however many other images also share that tag , which is why I go the route I go.

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But that means that the absence of a tree structure is in the way you use the system, not in the system itself. Having collections of images allows digikam to check for new images on start-up, without having to trawl the whole HDD. It’s slow enough as it is on a few thousand images in one tree.

I wonder if you could get away with just three collections:

  • finished images
  • images “under treatment”
  • everything else.

And I can’t help wondering why you need 17 versions of an image… You could also use other means to reduce the number of results: stars, colour labels, and pick labels. And images can be grouped, and only the group head shown (not sure what that does with searches for tagged images, though).