Importing from an SD card

Software digiKam
1

Currently, I’m using Digikam on a Linux box. To ingress images I use RPD.

Works fine for my purposes.

As my PP’ing is primarily done in Capture One, on my Windows box, I was thinking about migrating my Digikam database over yonder, being the subject of another post.

The challenge of Digikam on Windows is RPD is not easily instantiated. I’m using Win10 and have “dabbled” with running RPD in WSL, but have thusfar proven unsuccessful.

So, I’m working through image import in Digikam and frankly, my head hurts.

My images are stored on my NAS thusly:

image
image1279×444 34.3 KB

(From my Windows box)

So I want Digikam to store my files this way.

The first challenge, is there doesn’t seem to be a way to set the Caption in the import daemon. At least not a way that I can figure out.

The next challenge is the actual renaming. The documentation is VERY sparse, but I twiddled through it a bit.

Assuming I’m using the “Auto-creation of Albums”, which I’ll get to in a bit, the Custom rename tag I have is:

[date:yyyyMMdd]-[meta:Iptc.Application2.Caption].###.[ext]

Based in the daemon, this looks right, if I could figure out how to set the IPTC Caption.

I’ve toggled the"Auto-Creation of Albums", chosen "Date-based sub-albums, and then chosen the “Custom” category. The other selections, ISO, full text, and local settings are a mystery.

My Custom date format is:

[date:yyyy][date:MMdd]-[meta:Iptc.Application2.Caption]\

As there is no Caption, for fun I manually entered a Caption name, so my strings look like:

Rename: [date:yyyyMMdd]-Jamestown-Scotland Ferry.###.[ext]
Folder: [date:yyyy][date:MMdd]-Jamestown-Scotland Ferry\

The resulting screen looks like:

image
image863×497 30.6 KB

The first thing to notice is the echo of the Album name is completely wonky.

If I attempt to “Download” this, it tells me it can’t create the folder and puts all the images in the folder selected for download.

Any wisdom you can share on this conundrum would be greatly appreciated.

2

That is because the custom date format doesn’t use the same syntax as the renaming.
What happens with your wonky directory name is that the \[ is treated literally, then the d is the day number, ate is literally, and so on. That is explained in the manual. Also note what it says about including literal text (use single quotes, important in your example with the “Ferry” bit…)

So your example should be something like

\yyyy\MMdd'-Jamestown-Scotland Ferry'\

Fairly normal: a caption is normally specific to one or a few images. So it’s not set by Digikam on import, as one of the reasons to use digikam is adding the captions and keywords. You’d have to provide a caption for each individual image, not a very nice workflow.

Also, the IPTC “caption” (and the digikam “caption”) are for longer descriptions of the image content, more than two or three words. A caption can (and often does) contain several phrases. “Title” would be a better choice, but you still run into the issue that the import dialog is for bulk importing images…

But you can still use the various metadata tags because there are use cases where such tags get a value before import into digikam.

3

Thanks.

The Caption field is what I use in all my other images.

RPD doesn’t do metadata either but allows the use of Job Tags for naming purposes. Not ideal but workable.

Appreciate the info. I need to think about the big picture.

cheers