I would do the same but with tags.
Event- vacation
Place- CostaRica
Wildlife- bird or just wildlife
One thing I like about tags - one image can have many of them. But it is hard to place a single image in few folders. You can copy it of setup simlinks for sure but that will be even more complicated than figuring out your tags structure
I’d certainly suggest sticking to one program/method as far as tagging and organising goes. Spreading that kind of data between multiple structures is not good. Both digikam and darktable have sensible databases (and in no way opaque) from what I’ve looked at briefly, but how they compare in actual use I know nothing about.
Yes that’s good’-many tags to one image. You do have to invent a naming
convention and stick to it
I’m not saying my way is better. Just that it’s convenient and valid.
Sometimes I add searchable (visible) attributes to a directory of images
with “touch”
… touch lamar-river
… touch playing-tag etc
/* colin (sandy) pittendrigh */
Having just discovered darktable and digiKam recently, I was bolled-over with dt’s image processing abilities but not thrilled with its data asset management model/interface. However, within minutes of installing digiKam I was enjoying its asset management interface immensely. So I use each for it’s particular strength. I can only suggest that you use what feels best for the task and not worry if that means using separate applications.
My experience in a nutshell:
2007: “I’ve avoided tagging my images for too long…”
2008: Back to using a file browser and a semantic folder structure.
I semi tag my stuff. Everything that goes on the web is tagged as my website uses the tags, captions and gps info. I have a public website and a private one for family photos running the same setup.
I do get a bit lazy tagging people in family photos… I’m using darktable or Geeqie for tagging and they are not ideal. Darktable is to slow and Geeqie to rudimentary. Making things worse I also use Rawtherapee which doesn’t really do metadata.
So I’ve been considering Digikam… A bit scared at running that kind of software as I feel they tend to make a lot of assumptions and be very “helpful” in ways you might not appreciate. I do like however the way it helps with face tagging. That queue thing looks very convenient.
Are there any risks associated with running digikam on thousands of DNG, jpg and xmp files tagged with the software mentioned above? I want xmp’s together with the files, a separate database is useless to me.
Can digiKam sync tags between files with the same filename? I want the metadata to be associated with the DNG’s (my camera produces DNG’s) In my workflow the raw file is the source I come back to whenever I need a image for a new context/media. So the DNG needs to be prepped with all the metadata my exports should have. Otherwise I’d have to retag for every export? Here RT is a bit of a problem as the exported files won’t have the metadata from the xmp files. So I need a convenient way of syncing metadata. I know about exiftool
exiv2 etc but when dealing with images I find I need visual sort etc to keep track of things.
From what you described it looks to me that darktable will work better for you. Darktable does copy metadata to exported jpegs.
Digikam can group raw and jpeg and do some operations including tagging on the grouped files at the same time but I don’t believe it will copy metadata from raw to a new jpeg export.
As for where digikam stores your metadata, there are few options:
Database (sqlite or mysql)
Xmp sidecars (they sync well between darktable and digikam)
Embedded metadata (jpegs only. There is an experimental support for DNG but I think it is going to disappear from digikam in future due to users complains about DNG corruption)
Having said that, if your DNG has a sidecar with some tags and information added by either darktable or digikam the new jpeg you export from that DNG in darktable will have all the tags written into the file and both digikam and darktable will see them (for some reason sometimes the new jpeg shows up in digikam without tags but the tags appear few minutes later or after restart)
Thanks for the info! Perhaps I’ll give digiKam a try because the people tagging does look good particularly if it’s darktable compatible. I do need to use RawTherapee for my Pentax Pixelshift files as well as for more severe highlight recovery. I guess I need to manually copy metadata for those files.
Try copying the xmp sidecar and renaming it to match the jpeg created in RawTherapee. Who knows maybe that will do the trick.
This is exactly why I just keep to a logical file structure! All my good ones get processed and uploaded to Flickr anyway, so tags in my large raw database just seem like overkill for me, as a dedicated amateur photographer. If I was a working pro, however, maybe it would make more sense to tag…
I currently follow this workflow, which seems to work well for me:
Trips|Everglades) so that I can either filter by all trips or by a specific trip. This helps me narrow or widen my collection as I require.This system means that I’m always able to filter as narrowly or as widely as I require, and sort by how good the photos are, with very few clicks. Since I can also easily find a particular day’s photos because of the way I imported the photos, I’ve found I don’t really need any other tools to manage/organize my photos.
Very true. But on linux (at least - I think also on macOS?), you can do hardlinks (using a simple ln <orig> <dest>). But I do think tags are the better option in this kind of scenario.
My ‘semantic folder structure’ dates back to 2004. Looking for images can be fun and rewarding; oftentimes, looking for, say, a particular train image, I’ll run across travel/kid/grandkid images that take me back…
In addition to good memories, I ususalky find a photo or two that I originally passed on that I like now, and will post process and share.
I try to look over my entire catalog at least twice a year.
This thread got me doing just that. From 2004, one of my all-time favorite images. If you look at the exif, note the camera…
Squirrel !!!
The link doesn’t work for me; is the article available via another route ?
Your first post sure is a helpful post; I clicked and went straight to it; thanks.
My brief metadata story:
To my experience that total flexiblity of Digikam to allow read-only, write-only and read-write of metadata from image files or sidecar files is a very very big advantage. You have to play with this and find your way!
